Juli Clover, MacRumors:
Apple has recently been sending out surveys to customers who purchased an iMac Pro, asking them about which features drew them to the pro-level machine and what they like or dislike about the iMac Pro.
And:
Apple regularly sends out surveys of this nature to customers, but this line of questioning on the iMac Pro suggests Apple is perhaps trying to suss out key features that pro-level users want to see in future pro machines, such as the Mac Pro machine that’s in the works.
And:
Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi admitted last year that with the 2013 Mac Pro, Apple designed itself into “a bit of a thermal corner” given the restrictive size of the trash can-shaped Mac Pro and its inability to handle the thermal capacity needed for larger single GPUs.
“A bit of a thermal corner”. Love that turn of phrase. This survey seems a solid sign that Apple is doing their best to learn from their mistakes, hit a home run with next year’s Mac Pro.
Yeah, I’m really curious to see if Apple can bring themselves to release a computer that doesn’t have the RAM and hard drive soldered to the motherboard. Or, heaven forfend, a swappable CPU. It all seems so unlikely.
Most people give zero shits about swappable CPUs… get real. Appliance computing is here to stay and normals are fine with it.
I completely agree with you. But the Mac Pro isn’t for normals. It’s specifically for the type of user who might actually want to swap out the CPU. When I worked at a physics lab a few years ago we started doing numerical modeling on our cheese grater Mac Pro. To speed things up, we swapped out the quad core CPU for a 12-core CPU and put in 128Gb of RAM. It was a monster! So while most people don’t care about swappable CPUs, it is important for a few.
The Mac Pro was never made for “normals” or most people. That’s who the iMac is for, people who are so afraid to even snap in a RAM chip. Lots and lots and lots of folks want to open up their machine and swap out parts. Just ask PC owners.
People want a tower they can put stuff into and expand. The same thing we had for 20 years before Apple lost their minds. Apple is not doing its best if it doesn’t understand what people want despite people loudly saying they want the thing they once already had.
Apple only needed to update the cheese-grater Mac Pro with the latest hardware components and they would have had a winner. No major retooling would have been required. The cheese-grater Mac Pro was a solid design and easily upgradeable. Sure, it was heavy and bulky but that’s what is required for a pro machine.
Apple had to try to overthink the situation and ended up with an expensive, cylindrical, dead-end design that pleased almost no one. I’m not sure who at Apple thought up that cylindrical design, but they clearly didn’t understand the pro market. Why buck industry standard PCIe slots and neglect on-board drives. A pro machine needs internal volume to be able to move air to prevent/resist thermal throttling. It doesn’t take a genius to understand something that simple.
That cylindrical Mac Pro was more towards form over function and it seems like something Jony Ive would do without consulting people who understood workhorse computers. The people who designed the cheese-grater Mac Pro were spot on. Everything in the cheese-grater Mac Pro’s design screamed workhorse PC. Even now, I’d rather have a cheese-grater Mac Pro than the current trash-can model (provided I could upgrade the motherboard to faster specs). That modular CPU tray was a work of art and Apple pissed it all away.
I disagree. For over a decade every enterprise client (fortune 100 – 500) I’ve worked for issues laptops, and when they outlive their usefulness they are replaced outright. And at home personally I chose an all-in-one iMac, and craig suggested that was the most popular option with developers. I have little desire to crack open my computers and install hardware anymore. I’m not alone. DIY is for tinkerers and hobbyists. Us pros want turnkey and just want to do our work, not play at being an IT tech.
Sigh. Tech journalists need to stop being so utterly ignorant about the time it takes a hardware manufacturer like Apple to create a new product. This survey is happening way too late to have anything to do with the upcoming revamp of the Mac Pro.
The lead time for any kind of decision making about what features to put in or take out of a hardware product is well over a full year before the product goes on sale. If the design and specs of the new Mac Pro have not been finalized by now, they are very close to being finalized as I type this.
I’m an iMac Pro user (lowest end stock machine) who hasn’t seen the survey yet but I have to say, I had a trash can Mac Pro before this computer and I loved it. I’d still have it had Apple released a decent screen for the thing.
All of that said, the iMac Pro is a fantastic computer. It reminds me of what I liked about the SE/30: Lots of power in the same (iMac) box.
I have no regrets about buying this computer, the highest-end Mac I’ve ever had. No matter what I throw at this machine it doesn’t break a sweat. No fans, ever. Great screen. Plenty of ports (I wish they were more easily gotten to) and a nice design.
As far as “modularity” or user upgradeability, I’m fine with a sealed box and always have been. Yes, I used to crack things open and upgrade various things and I understand that some users enjoy tinkering and that’s fine, but I’m done with that.
I see a lot of complaints online about the trashcan Mac Pro but everyone I know who had or has one loves it. Every single person. Yes, they all wish the ports were upgraded but aside from that, they’re very happy with the machine, as was I.
You used that word three times. Which “people”?
It’s tempting to somehow think of one’s pro-user niche as the norm. It ain’t.
I’ve always enjoyed tinkering with my Macs, starting with the SE in 1990, but I always knew that whatever computer Uncle Earl from Wichita was buying for himself, odds were very high it was never going to get
cracked open after the purchase.
I cracked them open to add capability that gave the machines a slightly longer useful life. Secondarily, to understand a little about how those capabilities worked. Apart from RAM, that ended when I got my iMac 5k two years ago.
It’ll be nice to see new user-modifiable Mac Pros again, but unless the new line includes a lower-cost Mac mini option, I expect they’ll come with even more of a premium price than the iMac Pros. That niche is still getting smaller for those “people” who don’t work in chic high-end production shops.
I believe that Apple has hoped that the Mac Pro would just die. Nothing else explains their behaviour.
The Mac Pro’s page on Apple’s site sounds like one of those long forgotten web pages on some defunct web site that was never taken offline simply because people forgot where the server is.
The memory/drive configurations and prices are a relic of 2013 (48 GB ram for $1200). They set it and forgot it and it’s been just there; whatever it sells, it sells.
With the Mac, Apple behaves like a cash-strapped poor company that can barely afford to hire more than one engineer to keep the mac hardware up-to-date.
All Apple had to really do about the Mac Pro is listen to their users. Just get the latest PC technology and slap it inside the Cheese Grater and make it run macOS and be done with it. How hard could that be?
Unless they’re creating some wiz-bang new technology that will blow our socks off, (replace thunderbold, move to ARM) there is no justification whatsoever to the two years(+) delay between the time they apologized for screwing up the mac pro and its replacement’s release. It doesn’t take that long to design something that already exists in the market. Barring any of the totally unexpected moves I mentioned, Apple isn’t going to do more than package other companies’ tech into the Mac pro. They don’t create the chipset, the processor, IO or any of stuff that’s inside the Mac Pro now, what’s the hold up? Case design? Motherboard layout?
I still believe they wish it would simply go away.
The cylindrical mac pro does not have soldered storage or ram and it was specifically marketed with those parts called out as being user upgradable. The Imac Pro does not have soldered parts either (getting the computer open without breaking anything is not a job for amateurs, but once you do it is all upgradable).
Soldered vs socketed CPUs are a feature of the specific chips that a manufacturer buys from Intel. Laptop chips are increasingly soldered because that’s thinner and lighter and involves a smaller part count and all manufacturers of laptops want all three of those things. Very few manufactures ask for socketed laptop CPUs these days, so Intel has mostly stopped offering them.
However, Intel does not provide Xeon chips in any form factor other than socketed because they are a desktop part and because none of the manufacturers of servers want soldered CPUs. So you can count on any new pro desktop mac from Apple having socketed CPUs, just like always.
“but they clearly didn’t understand the pro market. Why buck industry standard PCIe slots and neglect on-board drives.”
Apple did a lot of market research, they looked at what their biggest and best customers were wanting and identified where the trends were heading, and the cylindrical Mac Pro encapsulated all those trends and desires, as well as their best bets for where the future was heading. Where they went wrong was in a) betting on dual GPUs instead of more beefy solo GPUs, and b) failing to realize just how many of their loudest and proudest Mac Pro customers were a bunch of hidebound, change resistant luddites.
Their market research told them that many shops were switching to putting each project on its own external drive. That way you never have to worry about running out of storage space, never lose any work when a computer dies, and can easily hand off a project from one person to another without worrying that needed files fail to transfer.
That jibed well with their sense of where the future of internal storage was heading – towards all solid state, supplemented with NAS and external drives. And they already knew that the future of expansion is Thunderbolt, which can work with laptops as well as desktops. In a world where the vast majority of people are doing their work on laptops, PCI-e expansion cards are an incompatible and dying standard.
Where Apple went wrong was in backing the wrong horse in GPU trends, and in failing to provide any kind of blessed expansion box on day one for those customers who were bucking the trend vis-a-vis hard drives and PCI-e cards.
Indeed, this video from the Entagma head honchos is revelatory, GPU rendering nowadays is a must have prerequisite for 3D/Motion Graphic artists –