Last night, the iMore site was down temporarily, as they got ready to roll out their new web site design (congrats to the iMore team, by the way). I responded to the “under construction” tweet like so:
Turns out, I was more right than I had any right to be. From this morning’s Daring Fireball:
> Let’s not beat around the bush. I have great news to share:
>
> Apple is currently hard at work on a “completely rethought” Mac Pro, with a modular design that can accommodate high-end CPUs and big honking hot-running GPUs, and which should make it easier for Apple to update with new components on a regular basis. They’re also working on Apple-branded pro displays to go with them.
Though there’s a splash of ice cold water to go with that news:
> These next-gen Mac Pros and pro displays “will not ship this year”. (I hope that means “next year”, but all Apple said was “not this year”.) In the meantime, Apple is today releasing meager speed-bump updates to the existing Mac Pros. The $2999 model goes from 4 Xeon CPU cores to 6, and from dual AMD G300 GPUs to dual G500 GPUs. The $3999 model goes from 6 CPU cores to 8, and from dual D500 GPUs to dual D800 GPUs. Nothing else is changing, including the ports. No USB-C, no Thunderbolt 3 (and so no support for the LG UltraFine 5K display).
The cold water makes me wonder why Apple chose to leak this information in the first place. And in this manner.
The answer lies in John Gruber’s post. A story well told. Four people from Apple and five journalists, all privy to the Mac Pro rollout news:
> There are only nine people at the table. Phil Schiller, Craig Federighi, and John Ternus (vice president, hardware engineering — in charge of Mac hardware) are there to speak for Apple. Bill Evans from Apple PR is there to set the ground rules and run the clock. (We had 90 minutes.) The other five are writers who were invited for what was billed as “a small roundtable discussion about the Mac”: Matthew Panzarino, Lance Ulanoff, Ina Fried, John Paczkowski, and yours truly.
Go read Gruber’s post for the rest. Not the timing I would have hoped for, but I can definitely see how this all came to pass.
UPDATE: This from Jason Kottke this morning:
> Gruber runs a one-person independent blog that he started as a hobby and now he’s one of five people on the planet that the largest company in the world invites in for an unprecedented preview of new Mac hardware. (And I would argue he’s perhaps the only one invited who would be viewed as indispensable — you could see the others swapped out for Mossberg or Pogue or Swisher or Manjoo, but not Gruber.) That’s incredible and inspiring. It may be the twilight of the independent blogger, but Gruber continues to show how a small-but-obsessive site can do things no one else can.
Spot on.
So, Apple paid attention to those saying ew need a roadmap. These are capital request items.We’ll see.
My guess is that this was a very recent decision based on a couple of things. Theoretically, it sounds like they’re making a sequel to the cheese grater, although I bet it’s much smaller. So you’d figure that wouldn’t take very long, right? I think the plan was making a pro iMac and retiring the Mac Pro. But they listened to the feedback from pro users and saw the LG display end up poorly (at least initially), and now we have this. We’re still getting the pro iMac they were already making, and we’re getting a new Mac Pro too.
Good for Apple for making their intentions re the Mac Pro clear – they really had to do this. They obviously F’d up big time on the Mac Pro. The initial product vision was wrong, and 3+ years of the same hardware at the same price was a joke. Not sure why it will take another year to deliver a new box – I suspect most Mac Pro buyers would be reasonably happy with a more or less standard dual Xeon PC that ran OS X.
But why is the next iMac revision so late? Its 18 months since the last one, six months since the MBP went all-in on USB C and only now they’re giving vague promises of a new iMac later this year?
Schiller: “demanding pro customers.”
I’ll agree that I’m demanding and a Pro customer.
Glad Apple’s at least attempting to manage expectations a bit better than before.
“it sounds like they’re making a sequel to the cheese grater,”
My money is on this not being so. The cheese grater is a relic from the era of the optical disk and the spinning hard disk.
My bet is that they’re going to stick with the good from the cylindrical mac pro – power efficient, quiet, small, all-solid state. But they’re going to make it more modular and have the ability to handle bigger, hotter graphics cards, dual CPUs, and multiple SSDs. Maybe it will accept standard generic graphics cards, but I won’t hold my breath. Will it have standard PCI-e slots beyond one for the GPU? I would be surprised. Will it have a space for a standard 3.5″ drive? Almost certainly not. A 2.5″ drive? I really very much doubt it.
There were stories a few months ago claiming that the engineering division in charge of macs is in some disarray inside Apple. Disarray as in poor decision making, wasted effort, and projects not getting done on time. That’s the part of the story that’s not getting mentioned today.
Unless I misinterpreted, there was no mention from the Apple execs about whether that new modular Mac Pro would be user-modifiable.
Also, Fried and Paczkowski didn’t write very much at all about this announcement. Why were they invited?
Learning there are new iMacs, that’s great to hear.
But I nearly wept at learning there are new Pro displays in development. It’s like hearing Mozart’s Ah Tutti Contenti for the first time or something.
https://sonichits.com/artist/Ah_Tutti_Contenti
There’s a difference between customers who are demanding things they genuinely need, and customers who’ve been demanding things they simply hate to give up.
That’s true. I fall into both those categories.
The return of Apple-branded displays, that’s the news that had me lightheaded too.
Yeah, something is/was wrong in the Mac group. The MacBook Pro was delayed, all the desktop Macs are ancient or worse – even the MB has passed the year mark without a refresh.
Not sure if its fair to blame it on Jony Ive, but the latest round of designs have all been a little bit style over substance: the cylinder Mac Pro, the iMac that is too thin for a built-in ethernet port, the sealed up Mac mini, the USB C-only MBP with its stupid arrow keys… I hope this meeting signifies a bit of a philosophical change at Apple. A huge change isn’t required, but dialing back the emphasis on thin/light would be nice.
The model of tiny central box with a bunch of external boxes sucks, IMO. Too many cables and power cords. The USB C connector is not very secure – just takes a bit of movement to inadvertently unplug an external drive.
I haven’t owned a Mac Pro since it was called the PowerMac G4, but if I was to buy one I’d want something closer to the grater than the trash can.
That means dual Xeons, at least two slots (to support multiple standard video cards), and lots of room for internal storage, including spinny disks. I personally have no need for an optical drive, but I bet enough users do to justify making one drive bay with a removable front.
I couldn’t agree more.
Lots of spinning hard disks inside your computer are a relic of the past. If you need always-connected mass storage, get a NAS.
We all tend to hear a lot more often from the latter.
I thought I was both of those categories, too. I wanted a modular replacement for my 2010 Mac Pro, but I’ve been using an iMac 5k since July. It remains to be seen whether that proves equally durable, but the price was hard to ignore.
In retrospect, after having seen how well a Dell Ultrasharp 24″ has worked for my wife, I regret spending the extra cash for my unadjustable Apple monitor, regardless of the OS-related conveniences.
But a NAS is constrained by wifi or ethernet. Internal SATA is quite a bit faster… and a local filesystem has less overhead and potential weirdness than a network fs.
Apple likes to build machines for the future, but pro users often have to work in the present (and frankly often the past as well).
You’re definitely a rational tech consumer. I’m decidedly not.
I want the days back when I could live in a 100pc Apple hardware and periferial world.
If its a 2018 release then this is a very recent decision.
I want to have the kind of disposable income that still makes that possible. 🙂
I was not saying it will literally be a new cheese grater. When I said “sequel” I meant it will take more cues from the philosophy of that machine than the 2013 Pro. I would not be remotely shocked if they omit 3.5″ drives from the machine, and no 2.5″ support would not surprise me. I do wonder if they would add M.2 slots for storage expansion, however. I know they use their own special M.2-like port, but Mac OS already supports NVMe and it would be really cool to be able to add additional super-fast storage. I know this is not exactly Apple-like, but it would benefit them to swing the pendulum the other way a bit with this machine after they went so far in the other direction.
One slightly unrelated note: The Mac Pro was a dream to repair as a Genius. Didn’t do many, but it was the most fun I had repairing a machine.
It’s hard to see how it could be “modular” without being user-moddable. User upgradable solid state storage, and RAM: the cylindrical MP had that, so the new one probably will too. User upgradable CPUs, no, that’s never been sanctioned even for the old tower mac pros, so they aren’t going to start making that easy for people now. User upgradable GPUs – who the hell knows.
Not necessarily. The old tower mac pro saw its last hardware (as opposed to spec bump) update in 2009, after significant hardware changes each year for the previous three years. So the cylindrical MP was 4 years in the making. Next year’s MP will have been 5 years in the making. About par for the course, in other words. The MP doesn’t sell well enough to justify a large engineering team anymore, so everything takes longer.
So were the G5 Power Macs, but those liquid cooled systems were a nightmare to gut under the quality program.
I probably have an unnatural attraction to Apple-brand displays. What can I say, I get seduced by them; dare I say there’s even an emotional connection. And thus, reason and logic take a back seat.
And so, even though the new LG screen looks nice, the bezel and exterior are not well thought out. Okay, yes you can raise it with minimal effort. But aside from that it wobbles, there is no reasonable cable management, feels cheap, etc.
Given Apple’s increasing opposition to user-modifiable components, I’m pretty sure they’ve explored ways to take back part of what they’re promising. 😉
Yes, they’re beautiful and nicely integrated into the OS. But if you can’t rotate or raise and lower one without opting for a VESA-mount variant, I’m pretty much done with them. Enjoy your aluminium.
Wouldn’t that be great if they added both those features to the new design? I’d buy it.
To heck with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs 🙂
To heck with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs 🙂
That would certainly put those units back on my map, but barring some aggressive pricing, they’d still be less cost-effective.
Strange way to interpret it. Apple didn’t all of a sudden “hear” the techie echo chamber and respond, they knew this before you did, and are now letting us know what’s up, the why.
It’s not a new decisions as a result of the whiners. No. Mac Pros are a “single-digit” of all Macs sold. That’s lousy. They’re not chasing them because of a Marco post or whatever.
oh christ — an ethernet port? get real. use a dongle if you need an ethernet port.
as for the MacBooks, the whole point of mobile is mobility, so thin and light is the absolute right choice, i love this about mine. dont need legacy ports, again get a dongle.
iPhones take more than a year to develop so unless you have some insider info, there’s no way to know that it’s recent. Personally I doubt that.
What do you mean by user modifiable? It sounds like people will be able to remove components and add updated ones (GPU, etc). I wonder how Apple will do drivers though – vendor creates, Apple certifies? Apple creates some core set, other than that vendor writes drivers? One of the issues with Wintel was always compatibility.
It sounds like someone will be able to replace components. If that means anyone other than a Genius, I’ll be relieved.
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Spot on … except for “unprecedented preview of new Mac hardware.” More like vaporware. Kudos to Gruber for this level of access, but let’s tell the story right – This is an embarrassing situation for Apple – breaking their decades-long protocol to reveal plans to do something. If some other company did this, everyone would have mocked it to no end.
Guaranteed that’s not the case.
You’re not the only one crying. Tears are streaming down at LG right now. Someone who used to work at Motorola is whispering, “I told you so …”
A rough timeline:
2013: new mac pro hits the market.
2014: Apple is pleased with what it has done.
2015: Sales figures are troubling. Users that Apple thought would love the new MP grumble.
2016: Apple goes back to the drawing board.
2017: The grumbling becomes a mob scene. Apple decides it’s time to apply some crowd control before pro users start throwing things at the expensive new windows at Spaceship HQ.
It always amazes me how many people want a built-in dongle for right now rather than the new connectivity for six months or a year from now.
“But a NAS is constrained by wifi or ethernet. Internal SATA is quite a bit faster”
Which is exactly why the mac pro has dual gigabit ethernet. At 250MB/second, it’s more than fast enough to keep up with spinning hard disks in a NAS. Also, reality check: Spinning Hard disks have been slower than SATA for quite a while now.
I still don’t get why the current Mac Pro didn’t get a single update in 4 years. Ok, so Apple bet on a certain philosophy involving parallel GPUs and it didn’t pan out. I get that. But surely there should still have been a roadmap of improvements, even if they were the “wrong” improvements.
How does anything Apple said in that meeting reconcile with them selling an unchanged machine for so long?
The fact is that I switched from Mac Mini + NAS to the 2009 cheese grater because of what an unmitigated disaster NAS was, compared to the 2009 MP (still going strong), which can be maxed out to 3 SSDs & 4 (5 if ambitious) 8TB each HDs.
If a 1TB machine is fine for your profession (say you are a developer) then the Trash Can is a perfect (other than up to date 5K video support) devices. But if you really need data, SSD is absolutely the future, but not the near future. Call me when Apple starts releasing a 35TB SSD computer. And as pro video/photo size only goes up up up, the idea that you don’t need huge, reliable, fast data capacity simply means you have a different line of work.
That’s a good point – and look at even the current update when it FINALLY does happen: the only SSD is still limited to 1TB, while even the new MBP goes to 2TB.
Seriously?- if you are running a large business depending on reliability you’ll count on WiFi for your desktop computers? Or you are forced to be Windows or Linux only? Just get a dongle? I can see the argument with laptops but not desktops.
Yes there is a ton of users for whom Ethernet is pointless, but calling it pointless for everyone (while not updating your companies WiFi devices) is a bad idea.
I agree. They should have at least updated the ports on the Mac Pro. But, all of this speaks to confusion in the Macintosh group at Apple. If the MacOS group got merged with the iOS group, that no doubt has had an affect on the hardware group. I think Apple has been talking about this since the release of the latest MacBook Pro and the uproar that it produced which was less about that particular machine, more about lack of support for Pro users in general (including support of the Mac Pro).
I’m less interested in the particulars of machine upgrades, more interested in Apple coming around to acknowledging that there is a community of high end users that they lost sight of and need to both acknowledge the existence of, and support with both hardware and software. Once we know that Apple fully gets this group, I have faith that they’ll come out with the hardware we want. Updates are going to be incremental for sure as the products are mature, but like the iPhone, they should happen on a regular basis.
Sources say that some people at Apple had a sense it was a dead end even before they finished it. I bet internal debates led to paralysis and they never came up with a single update.
“You had one job, LG Consumer Monitors Division.”
Wouldn’t new ports have required a major motherboard change? Doesn’t sound trivial to me.
Not a a chance it’s going to in any way resemble the cheese grater in size or form. That monstrosity is designed for very old technologies. We’re now going to get computers with M2 (modified no doubt) slots for PCIe drives, USB 3/Thunderbolt 3 for vastly faster connections than what we got with internal eSATA. Shoot, my Pegasus2 R6 RAID tests out as fast as an internal drive on my 2013 Mac Pro with Thunderbolt 2. Double that with the new machines. We might even get that new memory technology due out in 2018 that can function as RAM and storage at the same time, and has much better endurance than current SSDs. They even say it would be appropriate for high performance data centers, which would wear out current SSDs in no time.
Apple admitted in the meeting that external GPUs were a possibility. Of course that would require a connection that doesn’t just pop out with a bump. Some kind of locking mechanism would take care of that.
But NAS? Not a chance. Too slow. Internal drives? Why bother? Not even the cheese grater can handle that much storage. Plus with the new file system coming, all sorts of new possibilities come to mind for new arrangements of volumes for those with lots of storage to take care of.
Apple said it’s not coming soon, so their engineers can think about it, and come up with something completely new and something that will meet the needs of pros and provide a long-term solution for their needs. Not something that becomes outdated in a few years and needs, once again, another redesign. I look forward to Shiller some time in 2018 saying, “Abandon pros my ass!”
Eh, I think they’d be idiots to force you to take it into a store. It’s not like user replaceable cards are a new idea or that the tech to implement them needs to be created.
The one issue I can see being beyond some users is a CPU replacement which can be tricky and, if there’s thermal paste that needs to be cleaned off and then reapplied, can affect the stability of the system. But drives, CPU cards, sound cards etc? They’re not going to make that need a Genius Bar trip. There’s no need and it flies the face of what they’ve said and are doing.
I want to agree with you, but Apple is still fighting “right to repair.” Whether that affects the notional new Mac Pro in some way is something I’d like to know.
It’s going to be a long year, waiting for the result.
LOL!
“Had”
Sources?
You’re probably right. But, I don’t think Apple should be selling high end machines that won’t accept the same peripherals because of port differences. I know, dongles to the rescue… Sigh.
Repair is, I think, different since you’re disassembling things and in some cases doing so in ways that can compromise the device. Plus, you’re doing so to a device that by design isn’t modular. Removing something designed to be removed from a card slot isn’t at all the same. Again, they’d be the laughingstock of the tech world to sell a modular system whose designed intent is to allow people to replace components and then prohibit users for doing just that. I don’t see any rational basis for worry.
The capability Apple is lobbying against covers both instances, whether your device needs a repair, or if you want to add or upgrade a component. Apple is still trying to hide its proprietary work by forbidding us to even see the parts that aren’t proprietary. The more recent the model, the less access we have to it.
Fine, worry for the next year. I’ll assume their not complete idiots who would ship a system that’s defined as modular in response to clear requests for user upgradability and then thwart that very goal.
I believe they’re inclined to find a way, regardless of your optimism.
Alternatively, how do you get on the list of Apple’s “study group professionals”, where they send you hardware/software for feedback, so you get to use them for free?
I think what they said only relates to Apple’s hardware engineering teams being able to swap in newer chipsets/components with higher bandwidth, better performance, while maintaining comparable form-factor (they can always get smaller/thinner if they so choose..) and not having to worry about issues like heat dissipation.
I agree. But that they said nothing specific about user-modifiable components is my reason for not making plans to acquire a new Mac Pro next year.
User serviceable parts like RAM, hard drives, and GPU/CPU? To what end should a “prosumer” expect to keep their Mac Pros “current”? I think Apple needs to find the right balance between their design “magic” while addressing these expectations.
I’m a prosumer, and I’ve just about given up on that capability as far as Macs are concerned. It makes me sad. And it’ll be a while before I can bring myself to part with my Mac Pro 2010.
I think as a web dev I don’t need that kind of performance, but happy to see the improvements I got from maxing out RAM and swapping an SSD in my Early 2009 Mac Mini that is still going strong to this day.
It’s not so much the performance for me, as the longevity.