News - Apple Mac Pro available for order now, starts at US$2,999

[HEXUS]

And have you seen Apple's 'heart warming' Christmas TV ad?

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[jimbouk]

I can't help thinking that'd be a great advert for Google Glass where you don't even need to be holding a phone to record the whole thing. Although no less as creepy as them recording everything that's happening on a camera phone though...

[jateruy]

Apple Miner Pro....

[OilSheikh]

That's ugly. Perhaps Apple should have thought of making the PC into a football shape!

[kingpotnoodle]

Innovative-ish design, but IMHO far too proprietary and lacking in upgradeability for a "Pro" level device. Are Apple owning offices really that shallow as to prioritise looks over practicality, the old chassis offered far more in the way of upgrade potential... still I suppose that's what Apple want, to force everyone into buying new machines more often. Presumably they think they now have the market inertia to make that fly...

[mixindave]

lets plug 6 thunderbolt devices in at once.

[MaverickWill]

I can't help but feel that the new Mac Pro is "too little, too late".

There's a definite argument that to some professionals using OS X, the performance gains from switching to the new Mac Pro will be huge, and if time really is money, then it would seem like a no-brainer. The only problem with that sentiment is that Apple haven't given the Mac Pro any major upgrades since 2009 - they even left out support for the E5 Xeons in favour of carrying on with Bloomfield/Gulftown/Westmere, and the only upgrade really worth mentioning is the jump from the anaemic Geforce GT120 to a Radeon 5770 (a mid-range card in the high-end Mac Pro).

For a significant portion of the people using Mac Pros who deal in the reality of "Time = Money", at some point in the incremental Mac Pro upgrades, there must have come a point whereby using the old Mac Pros no longer made sense. These people will have jumped to pre-built machines from other vendors, and switched to the Windows version of their business software.

Granted, some will not have been able to switch to Windows, as their specific software needs may not have been met by the Windows equivalents. These people will buy the new Mac Pro.

However, I can't help but wonder how much the above use cases would have lost out on in the meantime, by not switching to a different system. If OS X is ABSOLUTELY VITAL, then they've made their maximum revenue in the period when others were transitioning, but that means their output (and therefore, revenue) was stymied by being locked in to a single vendor, and that should be worrying.

[jateruy]

Innovative-ish design, but IMHO far too proprietary and lacking in upgradeability for a "Pro" level device. Are Apple owning offices really that shallow as to prioritise looks over practicality, the old chassis offered far more in the way of upgrade potential... still I suppose that's what Apple want, to force everyone into buying new machines more often. Presumably they think they now have the market inertia to make that fly...

You have really missed the point of having so many TB ports on this machine.

[TheAnimus]

Then why have it look "pretty" it is going to look like a bizzare spiders web if you use them all. Plus the bandwidth just isn't as good as 16speed PCIe. Heck my SSD RAID would be clipped by the performance of thunderbolt. (it can peak at 1.5GB/s).

Whatever the Mac Pro is, it certainly isn't Pro grade performance. It's about 3 years old performance for, what are for many things vital.

[Pleiades]

Why so small? Why not a humungously large one (3x bigger) that you could actually add internal expansion to? I like gigantic chassis & I cannot lie ;-)

[MaverickWill]

You have really missed the point of having so many TB ports on this machine.

Unless the LGA-2011 and PCI-E 3.0 x16 > Thunderbolt adapters are being launched any time soon, you've missed the point of "upgradeability" AKA "I'd like a new processor and/or graphics cards in my work machine without buying a whole new computer".

[CampGareth]

A beefy CPU is always nice (been looking into dual xeon for video encoding and such) but those 12 core chips cost about £2k. Separately I'm concerned about the cooling capacity of that box, in a top end configuration it's meant to be generating about 600W of heat and dumping it into a low fin density heatsink, plus apple have been known to pull tricks like blowing the exhaust from CPU cooling over power supplies to keep the number of fans down.

[Odeas]

Don't put this on plush carpet, the air intake would be completely blocked!

I get that this looks nice to some people (looks like an apple bin to me) but for high performance as this seems to be aimed at it seems very impractical.

[peterb]

Then why have it look "pretty" it is going to look like a bizzare spiders web if you use them all. Plus the bandwidth just isn't as good as 16speed PCIe. Heck my SSD RAID would be clipped by the performance of thunderbolt. (it can peak at 1.5GB/s).

Whatever the Mac Pro is, it certainly isn't Pro grade performance. It's about 3 years old performance for, what are for many things vital.

It is fitted with thunderbolt 2 which has a theoretical throughput of 2.0GB/s which would service your SSD RAID with a little bandwidth to spare. And of course there are six of them. Thunderbolt will ALSO be a cheaper option than Fibre Channel, although i accept that FC starts where TB2 finishes - speedwise!

[kingpotnoodle]

You have really missed the point of having so many TB ports on this machine.

Going to add a 2nd CPU, more RAM and updated graphics over Thunderbolt then are they?

[kingpotnoodle]

I get that this looks nice to some people (looks like an apple bin to me)

I would laugh so hard if someone tried to throw their cold coffee in it.