Marco Arment:
The “trash can” 2013 Mac Pro addressed only a fraction of the needs solved by the previous “cheese grater” towers, aged quickly without critical upgrade paths, and suffered from high GPU-failure rates from its cooling solution — all because its design prioritized size and appearance over performance and versatility in the one Mac model that should never make that tradeoff.
Over the next few years, it became clear that the Mac Pro was an embarrassing, outdated flop that Apple seemed to have little intention of ever updating, leaving its customers feeling unheard and abandoned. I think Apple learned a small lesson from it, but they learned a much bigger one a few years later.
And:
By the end of 2016, in addition to the generally buggy, neglected state macOS seemed to be perpetually stuck in, Apple had replaced its entire “pro” Mac lineup with controversial, limiting products that seemed optimized to flex Apple’s industrial-design muscles rather than actually addressing their customers’ needs.
This paints a bleak picture, one of an Apple out of touch with their Mac base, and even more so with their vast community of developers.
But:
Then, in April 2017, out of nowhere, Apple held a Mac Pro roundtable discussion with the press to announce that they were in the early stages of completely redesigning the Mac Pro.
Nice writeup by Marco. It is hard to find the right balance between listening to the experts you’ve hired to drive your company forward, but doing that without losing touch with the community that buys your products.
The base iMac Pro is more powerful than the base Mac Pro (Vega 56 GPU, 1TB storage), costs $1000 less, and includes a 5k monitor. That’s the issue.
Meanwhile, Apple’s Radeon II (aka Radeon VII) isn’t capable of ray-tracing, so it can’t actually take advantage of that feature in Epic’s new Unreal engine (that Apple is touting). NVIDIA offers a complete lineup of desktop and mobile GPU’s capable of ray-tracing but Apple refuses to give users/customers the option of using their cards.
Additionally, Ryzen 3000, PCIE 4, Navi… are right around the corner, so this thing’s gonna be outdated by the time it’s released. Not to mention, a 2018 3.0GHz 32-core AMD Threadripper (or whichever Threadripper suits your needs) would trounce this thing.
At this point, I’m convinced their “Pro Workflow Team” is comprised of the studios creating content for AppleTV+.
And the iMac Pro is a 2-year old machine with 2-year old parts. That’s what beats the base model Mac Pro.
“The base iMac Pro is more powerful than the base Mac Pro (Vega 56 GPU, 1TB storage), costs $1000 less, and includes a 5k monitor.”
The base level new Mac pro only exists to make people mad on the internet. The point of the nMP is that it can be upgraded (by the owner) to a level far, far beyond the maxed out iMac Pro.
As a 3D design professional that purchased an iMac Pro to stop the gap between my 2012 cheesegrater and the 2019 cheesegrater, I’m not mad on the internet. I’m disappointed that they doubled the base cost of what’s ostensibly a chassis.
This hasn’t solved anything for the majority of users looking to upgrade their current Mac Pro (or iMac Pro), and it’s frustrating to see so many Apple bloggers rationalizing the price hike.
We can’t normalize Tim Apple’s greedy pricing.
Marco’s not too far off the mark, but it’s worth remembering that the trash can was also built with input from pro customers and Pro Workflow. The silent running “thermal core” design that ultimately backed Apple into an unfortunate thermal/upgrade corner was built as a flagship feature for audio and edit suite users.
If Apple had left themselves enough headroom — with, say, a slightly larger but still svelte trash can — we probably wouldn’t be having a lot of the conversations we’ve had over the past six years. But neither the Xeon processor line nor the GPUs are particularly optimized for heat, and many of us were (in hindsight, rightly) concerned that this would be another case where Apple said “OMG so many upgrade options!” and delivered none. (Lest we forget, Apple was caught so flat-footed on the ‘can that they didn’t even make SSD upgrades available except as ruinously expensive “no part returned” service spares.)
I’m still not convinced the “fixed” 2019 Mac Pro will really solve the upgradeability issue. The 1,1 Mac Pro got nothing in the way of official upgrades and was immediately obsolete, the subsequent cheese graters had a dearth of occasional under-specced and outdated GPUs, and the trash can didn’t even have enough after-purchase upgrades to qualify for a dearth. This same thread weaves all the way back through the G5s, G4s, G3s… we’ve heard this song before.
The expansion cage design is cool, sure, and the insane power supply capabilities are great, sure, but unless Apple’s going to deign to actually make sure there are regular releases of new GPUs and peripherals, so what? If, two years down the road, the entirety of my supported “upgrade” options are the three GPUs it originally shipped with two years ago, do I care that the PCI bus supply can push 1.21 gigawatts?
I wish Apple were listening, but I have my doubts.
But if you are listening, Apple, Hollywood video editors aren’t the only “pros” out there, and they aren’t the only users who want an upgradeable machine.
I wish I could share Marco’s enthusiasm for the Mac mini, but it, too, is a “limiting products that [seems] optimized to flex Apple’s industrial-design muscles rather than actually addressing their customers’ needs.”
In all irony, if you’re willing to put up with some driver skullduggery, and boot screen funkiness – you CAN get an NVIDIA card in to a 2010-2010 Mac Pro Tower. And if you want to run Mojave and Metal, you’ll need to. In fact, ALL the Video Cards offered at MacVidCards.com for MP 4,1 and 5,1 are NVIDIA. *eyebrow*
Indeed!
“just license Mac OS”
LOL That ship sailed a LONG time ago and is never coming back.
In all irony, if you’re willing to get into some driver skulduggery and boot screen weirdness NVIDIA cards will run in 2010-12 MP 4,1 & 5,1 Towers, and you’ll need to update your card to run Mojave and METAL. In fact one major online provider only offers NVIDIA cards as graphics upgrades.
“The 2010/“2012” Mac Pro was so good, and so upgradeable, that it’s in surprisingly widespread use today for needs that weren’t possible or compelling on the “trashcan” successor.” – Marco Armet
As a Self-employed graphic and Web Designer, I am still rocking a 2010 Mac Pro 5,1. Still in good shape and still plugging along. I expect I’ll try to upgrade this machine until I can’t any more – or the inevitable OS or Software upgrade renders it obsolete. But when the time comes, If I stay with the platform, I’ll probably be looking at an iMac Pro – not the new MP.
The iMac Pro is a proper stout beast on it’s own, but shares the primary limitation of the 2013 “Trashcan” Mac Pro – It is also essentially utterly non-upgradeable. That forces users to pre-buy at the time of purchase as much future capability as they foresee and can afford for the life of the machine.
I ran some numbers – Base iMac Pro – $5K (about what My MP and Display cost in 2011), Nicely Bumped up – $7400, Tricked out – $ 15,850. Yowsa. But at least you don’t have to buy a display… or the STAND.
“I’m disappointed that they doubled the base cost of what’s ostensibly a chassis.”
Compared to the 2012 mac pro, they doubled the number of ram slots, doubled the number of PCI-e slots, added two slots for Apple’s ultra-fast T2-based SSDs, and more than doubled the maximum CPU core count.
I think all that justifies an increase in the base price, don’t you?
Here’s a Dell Xeon-W workstation:
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/cty/pdp/spd/precision-5820-workstation/xctopt5820us_4
Configured with 8 cores, an 8gb Nvidia GPU, 32gb of ram, and 256gb of m2 ssd storage. Add thunderbolt, wifi, wireless keyboard and mouse. Add some more bits and bobs to support all that (eg, Microsoft charges extra if you have more than four cores, because they suck). Final retail price after making it match the entry level Mac Pro as closely as I could manage: 5,342.
However, the dell machine has fewer ram slots, fewer PCI-e slots, and maxes out at fewer cores. So as far as upgradability goes, it’s inferior on every metric to the Apple version.
And that’s the fundamental thing that you can’t seem to grasp: this new MP can fly far, far higher than the old mac pro. And that increase in potential has a cost, which means that the base version now starts at $6,000 instead of $2500.
Agreed. My 5,1, 2 x 2.4 GHz Quad-Core with a 1 TB mirrored RAID ran $4965 in 2011.
About what the sealed box BASE iMac Pro costs now. **SQUINT**
Also, the pre-2013 Mac Pros will NOT run Catalina. So there’s your EOL right there.
Headroom??? Where we’re going, Marty, we don’t need headroom!! Well said, Doc.
TL;DR: all we care about is Mac OS
Knowing that the base model components are throwaway placeholders to back into a “6k” price, the Apple upgrade pricing for the step-up model will double that price.
I could only justify investing in this machine if they stripped the CPU, GPU, memory and storage, sold the chassis for 3k, and made it compatible with the guts I want to install: i9 or Threadripper, and NVIDIA GPU’s in SLI mode (aka “MPX”).
Most 3D modeling apps still need a fast single core clock speed, and 3.0GHz is pathetic (forget about “Turbo” marketing).
I love Marco. He’s one of the few bloggers that has stood up to Apple but he, Siracusa, fanboy Gruber, and all the YouTubers are out of their elements regarding this workstation. Most of my colleagues moved to Windows years ago, and this won’t bring them back.
Adding insult to injury: this is the thanks we get after hanging in there, modding decade-old machines (that will drive NVIDIA GPU’s), buying iMac Pro’s, building Hackinstoshes, or just adding two hours to our workday for years while stare at a spinning beachball of death???
Apple, please just license Mac OS, so we can install it on a real workstation for the half the cost!!!
Marco Arment is such a drama queen. I don’t know what Macs he’s been using, but no, none of mine are generally buggy nor neglected. He seems to live in some sort of entitlement bubble, which is completely at odds with my every day life.
I know he’s part of the Techie Blogger Echo Chamber that constantly gets re-posted here, but it’s pathetic.
Yeah no. Augmenting their insanely profitable hardware business line with services does mean they have abandoned hardware for the much-less profitable services.
That ship sailed back when they cared about hardware. Now all they care about are services. They killed their routers, they licensed tvOS and AirPlay… I think they’re ready to–
Wait, I can already do this for free on a Hackintosh. Never mind. What I’m asking for already exists thanks to the Mac community.
I was running a 2012 5,1 with a 1080 Ti before I replaced it with an iMac Pro. When Apple made that machine, they truly cared about hardware performance (not just how it looked), compatibility (with virtually any GPU to this day), upgradability (not just 1st party), and user serviceability. And the base model started at $2,499 (same as the very first Mac Pro 1,1 in 2005).
I’m still happily on High Sierra which which runs like a dream. Mojave 10.14.5 is still buggy, slow, and kills NVIDIA support. Catalina kills 32-bit support, and won’t be stable until a year from now.
I’m in no hurry to trade speed, stability and compatibility for new features. It’s always the must-haves vs. the nice-to-haves in the game of “What Apple Giveth, Apple Courageously Taketh Away”.
Perhaps not coincidentally I think the start of the turnaround Marco talks about is around the last time we saw a Jony Ive-narrated video touting the latest product’s industrial design. I feel like his obsession with “thin” is the cause of the butterfly keyboard debacle. It’s also why the iMac has laptop components in order to make it uselessly thin on the edges.
I doubt very much that this would happen…but it could. Apple in 2019 is very different from Apple in 1997.
Licensing Mac OS in the 1990s nearly killed Apple. Today, Apple is not dependent on Mac hardware sales.
That said, I think you’re right; Apple will never license macOS again. But they could.
First party upgrades may languish, but the new MP has tons of standard PCI-e slots, so you can put in whatever third party solutions you want. Unlike the Imac Pro or the cylindrical 2014 Mac Pro.
uh, you do know Ive narrates the special video Apple made for the new MP, right?
Thin is good. Thin is how we move the needle and get new technologies and devices of the future.
The butterfly keyboard is highly publicized by tech bloggers, but they have no real data on failure rates. Apple said they’re within expected ranges. I have zero reason to believe Apple is lying, and plenty of reason to believe the tech bloggers are drama queens.
D’oh! I didn’t watch the video. ? That’ll teach me for posting while I’m falling asleep. (Hopefully.)