Hope this isn’t the closest we come to the real thing.
38 thoughts on “A Mac Pro 2 concept design”
Concept designs are usually executed by would be designers. I like the idea of something that looks like a computer tower, with easy access and some PCI expandability so I feel comfortable knowing I didn’t buy a $4000 boart anchor or trash can
Interesting concept, and it’d be nice to see something, anything, in the way of a Mac Pro, but this takes practicality too far, as bizarre as that may sound.
2.5″ SSDs are a compromise, designed to fit in desktops designed for hard drives. m.2 or even mSATA would be a much better choice.
Why? Is there a reason to have a tiny drive in desktop if it makes it more expensive? I mean if it is cheaper because it can share parts with the macbooks then fine but otherwise there’s no point. Also, you’re wrong, 3.5″ are for desktops, 2.5″ are for laptops.
Lol, regular form factor graphics cards with their video ports facing downward. Not gonna happen.
Too many ports for Apple.
Just give us the old Mac Pro tower design with a modern motherboard, CPU, and video card.
Done.
2 x GTX 1080 would add 360W TDP to the system. That’s 4 times more than the top of the line Kaby Lake i7 7700k @90W TDP.
To keep this AND keep that form factor it would need liquid cooling, I think.
As chain-able as Thunderbolt is, would you really need than many?
What I am saying is the graphics people seem to need to start taking TDP seriously, and they are starting too, but they are not there yet.
It’s cool, but seems to be just as likely to be produced as his Thor A1 gun. Plus I don’t think I’ve ever seen Apple produce anything that resembled a third-party concept design that was really just “more” of an existing Apple design (see all the pre-iPhone concepts for Apple phones that were just fancifediPods).
You’re “hoping” Apple takes a step backwards? Not a chance. External expansion just makes more sense. An updated Mac Pro, if and when it comes, will improve connectivity with Thunderbolt 3/USB-C and update the chipset. (I don’t think they’ll shrink it any, at last in the next revision.)
Want hard drives? Get a nice case, potentially a single case for all of them, and attach it via Thunderbolt 3 (40 Gbps) where they won’t add heat inside the Mac Pro.
Not the worst idea I’ve heard. Bring back the dual Xeons.
Don’t think we’ll ever see another Mac with expansion slots though (except maybe for video cards). Like it or not, Thunderbolt is the future there.
Easy of installation, cost, and space are advantages.
An m.2 or mSATA SSD just plug in, like a PCI card or a RAM module. A 2.5″ SSD needs to be screwed in. For Apple, this means reduced manufacturing costs. For users, this means easier upgrades.
Retail prices of mSATA and m.2 SSDs are about the same as SATA SSDs, but because there is less packaging, the costs to Apple are likely lower. This would add to Apple’s bottom line, with no negative performance impact to the buyer.
Space still matters, even in a desktop. At least, it matters to Apple.
Yes, you’re right. I made a mistake; I shouldn’t have said “desktop”. My point was meant to be SSD vs. hard drive, not laptop vs desktop. 2.5″ form factor for SSDs is a compromise, made to fit an SSD where a hard drive would normally go. That amount of packaging isn’t needed for something built around SSD.
But, you pointing out my mistake did make me think about this further: Perhaps the design isn’t so practical after all. It calls for 2.5″ drives, which is unnecessary for SSD, and a poor choice for hard drives in a desktop. The idea seems to be that you could use SSDs for speed or hard drives for capacity and value, but it picks a form factor that is not idea for either one. It’s a compromise in the “agreement where no one is happy” sense.
The handle is a cute nod to the G4 Cube.
Because expansion slots aren’t as necessary as they once were, I think Apple could get by with a machine half, or maybe two thirds, the size of the G5/old Mac Pro tower, and still be more easily expanded than the “Trash Can” Mac Pro.
not impossible, could be enough room at the bottom to plug a HDMI 2 extender into the card that sends the signal through the ports in the back of the case.
One of the reasons we get renders like this is that Mac Pro users seem to be saying two things:
1) “Give us the best, most advanced stuff.”
2) “Give us every legacy port imaginable. Give me expansion capabilities that I can’t define and might not use but I want them just in case.”
Those are to a degree contradictory. People also tend to think in terms of what they know, so expansion means internal cards vs external TB3 connected devices, etc.
Frankly, all Apple really needs to do is to take the current Mac Pro, update it with state of the art components and, ideally, create an MFi program for things like GPUs so that vendors can, if they want, create certified CPU cards. Make the GPU on the Pro removable to address this (alternatively, work with vendors to make external GPUs that connect via TB3 or make those yourself so that users can get the graphics power they want that way.)
3.5″ drives aren’t “for desktops” just because they used to be. HDDs are now about large storage at mediocre speed, for archival, servers, things like that. They don’t need to be inside the computer to reach their max speeds anymore, so they probably shouldn’t waste the space at this point. Even the 2.5″ form factor is no longer necessary. The future is all about M.2.
I’d still want a ⅔ machine, myself. Audio pros use PCIe cards for interfacing and DSP, there’s also high-speed storage and networking. I could probably do with two full length PCI slots (one for GPU) and one short/slower speed. I definitely don’t need 5.25″ optical bays anymore, nor four 3.5″ HDD bays. In fact, I’d prefer some combo of 2.5″ SSD bay(s) and M.2 NVMe connectors, or just the latter.
And as long as we’re wishing for stuff, for the GPU and M.2 cards: STANDARD. There’s got to be some clever way to use anything on the PC market without Apple cu$$$tom firmware onboard.
Looks almost exactly like my paper shredder.
Hopefully it’s not over-designed again. Just accept that the pro user wants a powerful (figurative) truck. An 18-wheeler; not a Chevy SSR. They’re not buying based on design.
Yep, they’re 5X faster. And no Macs use 2.5 inch drives any more.
Only if you’re a backwards-looking user. If you are looking forward, you’re looking for new gear to be USB-C/Thunderbolt 3. Hope the iPhone 8 is USB-C, but doubtful.
The thing is, you can run all those specialty cards in an external case running off thunderbolt. You don’t need them inside the case anymore. The old big mac pro was a huge box full of a half dozen things each of which a different five percent of Apple’s customers wanted. Cutting all those fringe features out and making a small, quiet, efficient computer was a good decision. Not doing something to make those disparate tiny groups of customers happy with the new pro was a bad decision.
Apple’s misstep was that they didn’t offer either a first party thunderbolt expansion box, or arrange to have a third party expansion box available at launch. Something that provided PCI-e slots and 3.5″ hard drive bays for those customers that needed such things.
I don’t care very much about “every legacy port imaginable.” Any pros with significant history ofusing Macs who are actually making noise about such things are being frivolous and short-sighted. And I feel making that a point to argue against is a bit of a straw man here.
But I do care about expansion. Starting with my second Mac, I significantly extended the useful life of five computers with third-party add-ons, not including RAM upgrades. Many of those add-ons were the precise opposite of “every legacy port.” They were newer connections that saved me the cost of a replacement computer while allowing me to take advantage of additional capabilities.
When each of those Macs were still new, I couldn’t have defined for you how those slots would get used, but to varying degrees, they eventually were.
I can understand the advantages of expanding externally. But I’m already missing the other advantage of fewer boxes on (or near) the desk, and fewer power/port cables cluttering the room.
Yeah, the 4x 2.5″ bays are the most stupid thing about that design concept. HDDs inside your computer are a legacy technology. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple eliminates HDDs from its desktop line in the next couple of years.
Apple’s position on this with the cylindrical Mac Pro is the correct one – If you need more storage than you can afford to buy as SSDs, get a NAS or an external HDD enclosure. Their only mistake in this regard was they should have made the new pro have multiple slots for plugging in SSDs instead of only one.
I’ve got an 2009 iMac, so granted, I’m not really the target market of an Mac Pro (I just want a new, reasonably powerful and expandable desktop).
That said, I’ve upgraded my iMac with a 1TB SSD (replacing the optical drive) and a 3TB HDD (replacing the original HDD). This provides a good mix of speed and capacity. Also, there is something to be said for keeping everything internal (though I do have an external TimeMachine backup).
So maybe two (or more) m.2 slots for SSD, and two (or more) 3.5″ SATA bays for HDD.
Then again, you may be right; Mac Pro customers who need HDD might be more likely to want an external RAID, so maybe internal SSD is all that’s needed.
I’d also love to see something mid-sized, expandable, that didn’t necessarily have PCIe slots (or maybe just the one for an upgradeable GPU). Either way, those specialty cards can’t always go in external cases. There are often very specific compatibility issues, and many of those cases are noisy as hell. Believe me, we have tried. I’m with you on “fringe features”, but in a way, this entire machine is a fringe feature.
Here’s hoping Thunderbolt 3’s speed and wider appearance on the PC side will solve a lot of this going forward.
It’s likely that none of those advantages outweigh the extra cost to Apple from damage (that probably shouldn’t be covered under warranty, but is because someone asked nice and there’s no proof). Or repairs from overheated components.
I’m not saying the power and port cables are good, but they’re ultimately manageable. Buying shorter connection cables helps. Routing cables carefully helps some, too. And externals that do more than one thing help, too.
For instance, if you’ve got ten hard drives to plug in there’s no good reason there can’t be a hard drive dock that takes ten hard drives. Hell, it probably makes a racket, too, so use a longer cable on that one and put it somewhere else. 🙂
This is not without some cost to convenience right now, but if peripheral makers would start moving instead of waiting it out we’d be in a better place. We’d shortly be looking back and wondering why we ever opened a computer just to add more storage or another port. 🙂
Fair enough. But then is the implication that tower computers were never meant to reliably run, say, four internal HDDs at once for any significant length of time? FWIW, overheating is what likely required my moving on from my MacPro5,1.
It would be nice to have bays for at least two 2.5″ drives – SATA 3/SATA 4 – maybe even two 3.5″ drives.
People call the Mac Pro a trash can. This concept design certainly can’t be any worse.
Looks like most of the ports are on the “back” including HDMI and DP/TB. This could work a variety of ways…. even leaving the ports on the underside – side caddy/stand or whatever.
Also remember, void where prohibited and your mileage may vary.
It’s a Mac designed by PC nerds.
Keep in mind that PCI-e 3.0 is 16GB/s (or 128Gb/s) vs 5GB/s (40Gb/s), and PCI-e 4.0 is twice the speed of 3.0.
Actually, PCI-e 3.0 is four times the speed of Thunderbolt 3 in PCI mode, as a PCI-3 slot is 16 lanes, vs. 4 lanes for Thunderbolt 3.
For some PCI-e cards, an external expansion chassis could work, but for others, the bandwidth may not be sufficient.
Judging from the previous reactions (and apparent difficulty manufacturing), maybe Apple needs to simply make the most utilitarian design. Expandable and powerful. With the last MP, they appear to have made a box that they don’t actually want to make (too much effort and cost for the sales).
You skipped the most important potential factor. One of those three types of flash drives you mentioned is much faster than the other two.
I made the point because this particular render touts tons of ports as an advantage and because of all the whining from the supposed Pro community about the USB-C ports on the MBP and the adapter issue.
I’m ambivalent about upgrades. The thing is, Macs hold their value really were in the first 3-4 years so it can be a better economic and performance boost to simply sell the Mac you have at age 3 or 4 and buy the new one. In fact, when Apple first started down the path of soldered RAM etc a few years ago this discussion was around and it was then claimed that only 5% of people ever upgraded their computer components. Now, of course, that might be the entire pro sector of the Mac OS base….
Port-wsie, I hear you but to me this is one of the advantages of USB-C/3.1/TB3. The do superfast data transfer, high bandwidth video, power, etc. While it’s always risky to say things like this, it feels to me like this could be the ultimate port – I have a hard time thinking of something you’d want a port to do that you cannot do on these.
Concept designs are usually executed by would be designers. I like the idea of something that looks like a computer tower, with easy access and some PCI expandability so I feel comfortable knowing I didn’t buy a $4000 boart anchor or trash can
Interesting concept, and it’d be nice to see something, anything, in the way of a Mac Pro, but this takes practicality too far, as bizarre as that may sound.
2.5″ SSDs are a compromise, designed to fit in desktops designed for hard drives. m.2 or even mSATA would be a much better choice.
Why? Is there a reason to have a tiny drive in desktop if it makes it more expensive? I mean if it is cheaper because it can share parts with the macbooks then fine but otherwise there’s no point. Also, you’re wrong, 3.5″ are for desktops, 2.5″ are for laptops.
Lol, regular form factor graphics cards with their video ports facing downward. Not gonna happen.
Too many ports for Apple.
Just give us the old Mac Pro tower design with a modern motherboard, CPU, and video card.
Done.
2 x GTX 1080 would add 360W TDP to the system. That’s 4 times more than the top of the line Kaby Lake i7 7700k @90W TDP.
To keep this AND keep that form factor it would need liquid cooling, I think.
As chain-able as Thunderbolt is, would you really need than many?
What I am saying is the graphics people seem to need to start taking TDP seriously, and they are starting too, but they are not there yet.
It’s cool, but seems to be just as likely to be produced as his Thor A1 gun. Plus I don’t think I’ve ever seen Apple produce anything that resembled a third-party concept design that was really just “more” of an existing Apple design (see all the pre-iPhone concepts for Apple phones that were just fancifediPods).
You’re “hoping” Apple takes a step backwards? Not a chance. External expansion just makes more sense. An updated Mac Pro, if and when it comes, will improve connectivity with Thunderbolt 3/USB-C and update the chipset. (I don’t think they’ll shrink it any, at last in the next revision.)
Want hard drives? Get a nice case, potentially a single case for all of them, and attach it via Thunderbolt 3 (40 Gbps) where they won’t add heat inside the Mac Pro.
Not the worst idea I’ve heard. Bring back the dual Xeons.
Don’t think we’ll ever see another Mac with expansion slots though (except maybe for video cards). Like it or not, Thunderbolt is the future there.
Easy of installation, cost, and space are advantages.
An m.2 or mSATA SSD just plug in, like a PCI card or a RAM module. A 2.5″ SSD needs to be screwed in. For Apple, this means reduced manufacturing costs. For users, this means easier upgrades.
Retail prices of mSATA and m.2 SSDs are about the same as SATA SSDs, but because there is less packaging, the costs to Apple are likely lower. This would add to Apple’s bottom line, with no negative performance impact to the buyer.
Space still matters, even in a desktop. At least, it matters to Apple.
Yes, you’re right. I made a mistake; I shouldn’t have said “desktop”. My point was meant to be SSD vs. hard drive, not laptop vs desktop. 2.5″ form factor for SSDs is a compromise, made to fit an SSD where a hard drive would normally go. That amount of packaging isn’t needed for something built around SSD.
But, you pointing out my mistake did make me think about this further: Perhaps the design isn’t so practical after all. It calls for 2.5″ drives, which is unnecessary for SSD, and a poor choice for hard drives in a desktop. The idea seems to be that you could use SSDs for speed or hard drives for capacity and value, but it picks a form factor that is not idea for either one. It’s a compromise in the “agreement where no one is happy” sense.
The handle is a cute nod to the G4 Cube.
Because expansion slots aren’t as necessary as they once were, I think Apple could get by with a machine half, or maybe two thirds, the size of the G5/old Mac Pro tower, and still be more easily expanded than the “Trash Can” Mac Pro.
not impossible, could be enough room at the bottom to plug a HDMI 2 extender into the card that sends the signal through the ports in the back of the case.
One of the reasons we get renders like this is that Mac Pro users seem to be saying two things:
1) “Give us the best, most advanced stuff.”
2) “Give us every legacy port imaginable. Give me expansion capabilities that I can’t define and might not use but I want them just in case.”
Those are to a degree contradictory. People also tend to think in terms of what they know, so expansion means internal cards vs external TB3 connected devices, etc.
Frankly, all Apple really needs to do is to take the current Mac Pro, update it with state of the art components and, ideally, create an MFi program for things like GPUs so that vendors can, if they want, create certified CPU cards. Make the GPU on the Pro removable to address this (alternatively, work with vendors to make external GPUs that connect via TB3 or make those yourself so that users can get the graphics power they want that way.)
3.5″ drives aren’t “for desktops” just because they used to be. HDDs are now about large storage at mediocre speed, for archival, servers, things like that. They don’t need to be inside the computer to reach their max speeds anymore, so they probably shouldn’t waste the space at this point. Even the 2.5″ form factor is no longer necessary. The future is all about M.2.
I’d still want a ⅔ machine, myself. Audio pros use PCIe cards for interfacing and DSP, there’s also high-speed storage and networking. I could probably do with two full length PCI slots (one for GPU) and one short/slower speed. I definitely don’t need 5.25″ optical bays anymore, nor four 3.5″ HDD bays. In fact, I’d prefer some combo of 2.5″ SSD bay(s) and M.2 NVMe connectors, or just the latter.
And as long as we’re wishing for stuff, for the GPU and M.2 cards: STANDARD. There’s got to be some clever way to use anything on the PC market without Apple cu$$$tom firmware onboard.
Looks almost exactly like my paper shredder.
Hopefully it’s not over-designed again. Just accept that the pro user wants a powerful (figurative) truck. An 18-wheeler; not a Chevy SSR. They’re not buying based on design.
Yep, they’re 5X faster. And no Macs use 2.5 inch drives any more.
Only if you’re a backwards-looking user. If you are looking forward, you’re looking for new gear to be USB-C/Thunderbolt 3. Hope the iPhone 8 is USB-C, but doubtful.
The thing is, you can run all those specialty cards in an external case running off thunderbolt. You don’t need them inside the case anymore. The old big mac pro was a huge box full of a half dozen things each of which a different five percent of Apple’s customers wanted. Cutting all those fringe features out and making a small, quiet, efficient computer was a good decision. Not doing something to make those disparate tiny groups of customers happy with the new pro was a bad decision.
Apple’s misstep was that they didn’t offer either a first party thunderbolt expansion box, or arrange to have a third party expansion box available at launch. Something that provided PCI-e slots and 3.5″ hard drive bays for those customers that needed such things.
I don’t care very much about “every legacy port imaginable.” Any pros with significant history ofusing Macs who are actually making noise about such things are being frivolous and short-sighted. And I feel making that a point to argue against is a bit of a straw man here.
But I do care about expansion. Starting with my second Mac, I significantly extended the useful life of five computers with third-party add-ons, not including RAM upgrades. Many of those add-ons were the precise opposite of “every legacy port.” They were newer connections that saved me the cost of a replacement computer while allowing me to take advantage of additional capabilities.
When each of those Macs were still new, I couldn’t have defined for you how those slots would get used, but to varying degrees, they eventually were.
I can understand the advantages of expanding externally. But I’m already missing the other advantage of fewer boxes on (or near) the desk, and fewer power/port cables cluttering the room.
Yeah, the 4x 2.5″ bays are the most stupid thing about that design concept. HDDs inside your computer are a legacy technology. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple eliminates HDDs from its desktop line in the next couple of years.
Apple’s position on this with the cylindrical Mac Pro is the correct one – If you need more storage than you can afford to buy as SSDs, get a NAS or an external HDD enclosure. Their only mistake in this regard was they should have made the new pro have multiple slots for plugging in SSDs instead of only one.
I’ve got an 2009 iMac, so granted, I’m not really the target market of an Mac Pro (I just want a new, reasonably powerful and expandable desktop).
That said, I’ve upgraded my iMac with a 1TB SSD (replacing the optical drive) and a 3TB HDD (replacing the original HDD). This provides a good mix of speed and capacity. Also, there is something to be said for keeping everything internal (though I do have an external TimeMachine backup).
So maybe two (or more) m.2 slots for SSD, and two (or more) 3.5″ SATA bays for HDD.
Then again, you may be right; Mac Pro customers who need HDD might be more likely to want an external RAID, so maybe internal SSD is all that’s needed.
I’d also love to see something mid-sized, expandable, that didn’t necessarily have PCIe slots (or maybe just the one for an upgradeable GPU). Either way, those specialty cards can’t always go in external cases. There are often very specific compatibility issues, and many of those cases are noisy as hell. Believe me, we have tried. I’m with you on “fringe features”, but in a way, this entire machine is a fringe feature.
Here’s hoping Thunderbolt 3’s speed and wider appearance on the PC side will solve a lot of this going forward.
It’s likely that none of those advantages outweigh the extra cost to Apple from damage (that probably shouldn’t be covered under warranty, but is because someone asked nice and there’s no proof). Or repairs from overheated components.
I’m not saying the power and port cables are good, but they’re ultimately manageable. Buying shorter connection cables helps. Routing cables carefully helps some, too. And externals that do more than one thing help, too.
For instance, if you’ve got ten hard drives to plug in there’s no good reason there can’t be a hard drive dock that takes ten hard drives. Hell, it probably makes a racket, too, so use a longer cable on that one and put it somewhere else. 🙂
This is not without some cost to convenience right now, but if peripheral makers would start moving instead of waiting it out we’d be in a better place. We’d shortly be looking back and wondering why we ever opened a computer just to add more storage or another port. 🙂
Fair enough. But then is the implication that tower computers were never meant to reliably run, say, four internal HDDs at once for any significant length of time? FWIW, overheating is what likely required my moving on from my MacPro5,1.
It would be nice to have bays for at least two 2.5″ drives – SATA 3/SATA 4 – maybe even two 3.5″ drives.
People call the Mac Pro a trash can. This concept design certainly can’t be any worse.
Looks like most of the ports are on the “back” including HDMI and DP/TB. This could work a variety of ways…. even leaving the ports on the underside – side caddy/stand or whatever.
Also remember, void where prohibited and your mileage may vary.
It’s a Mac designed by PC nerds.
Keep in mind that PCI-e 3.0 is 16GB/s (or 128Gb/s) vs 5GB/s (40Gb/s), and PCI-e 4.0 is twice the speed of 3.0.
Actually, PCI-e 3.0 is four times the speed of Thunderbolt 3 in PCI mode, as a PCI-3 slot is 16 lanes, vs. 4 lanes for Thunderbolt 3.
For some PCI-e cards, an external expansion chassis could work, but for others, the bandwidth may not be sufficient.
Judging from the previous reactions (and apparent difficulty manufacturing), maybe Apple needs to simply make the most utilitarian design. Expandable and powerful. With the last MP, they appear to have made a box that they don’t actually want to make (too much effort and cost for the sales).
You skipped the most important potential factor. One of those three types of flash drives you mentioned is much faster than the other two.
I made the point because this particular render touts tons of ports as an advantage and because of all the whining from the supposed Pro community about the USB-C ports on the MBP and the adapter issue.
I’m ambivalent about upgrades. The thing is, Macs hold their value really were in the first 3-4 years so it can be a better economic and performance boost to simply sell the Mac you have at age 3 or 4 and buy the new one. In fact, when Apple first started down the path of soldered RAM etc a few years ago this discussion was around and it was then claimed that only 5% of people ever upgraded their computer components. Now, of course, that might be the entire pro sector of the Mac OS base….
Port-wsie, I hear you but to me this is one of the advantages of USB-C/3.1/TB3. The do superfast data transfer, high bandwidth video, power, etc. While it’s always risky to say things like this, it feels to me like this could be the ultimate port – I have a hard time thinking of something you’d want a port to do that you cannot do on these.