As mentioned in the Mac Software forum here we finally have a new Mac Pro to look forward to. Thoughts ladies and gentlemen please.

First impressions:
- Oh look, the spiritual successor to the G4 Cube (although I suspect this will do a bit better although that will depend very much on the price)
- No proper expansion other than via TB2
- A maximum of 12 cores - are these real or virtual?
- Dual GPU's - again, presumably soldered on

It's gorgeous of course but I can't help but think that despite all of its power this will age at an epic rate unless they roll out new versions at a great rate of knots. If everything is soldered on (and I didn't really see any indication to the contrary except for the RAM perhaps) then what you buy will be what you get which kind of defeats a significant part of what the Mac Pro was about IMHO.

I'm assuming Thunderbolt 2 and PCIe 3 is simply a consequence of using Ivy Bridge-E based Xeon E5 chips. This is very much a good thing but even with 6 TB2 ports the new Pro is still a bit short of a whole PCIe 3 16x expansion slots bandwidth so unless you want to plug all 6 ports into a chassis to run a single graphics card when the FirePro become a bit breathless you're going to have to replace the whole machine.
The PCIe based flash storage should make it blisteringly fast but I suspect also scorchingly expensive. Given the confines of the case there wasn't much option I guess but again, you're going to be stuck with the storage you can afford at time of purchase plus whatever you plug in and you'd better hope it lasts as long as you want the machine to.

I get the distinct impression the new pro only has a single Xeon E5 in there. Current E5's run up to 8 cores or 16 virtual ones so if it was a dual CPU set up then they should have been able to max out at 16 cores using current CPU's. I don't think there have been any major announcements about the Ivy Bridge E5's yet so it will be interesting to see at what core count they top out at but I'm willing to bet that a dual CPU setup will give you up to 16 real cores and possibly more (current E7's go up to 10 per CPU IIRC).

To sum up, for now it's going to be an incredibly powerful machine as you'd expect but come launch time I suspect that aside from its size the spec is actually going to look a bit underwhelming compared to competing workstations from Dell, HP and the likes of Supermicro and friends. I also suspect that the price will make the previous base spec Pro look like a spectacular bargain.
If I could afford it would I want one? Yes, absolutely. If I was going to depend on it for my livelyhood then I'd have to have a serious look at the competition from a pure longevity point of view.

My only thought is screens. Will you be able to use an iMac as a display? Or do you need separate screens?

I wouldn't disagree with your analysis in general (nicely done) but you're contradicting yourself a bit here. Either you're after a workstation that you spend a lot of money keeping constantly state of the art by upgrading, or you're looking for a workstation with 'longevity' in terms of it being useful for a few years (say 4 years to write it off the asset list) without the extra expenditure. I don't see how those two requirements aren't mutually exclusive.

My guess is this thing will be internally revised at about the same rate other Macs currently are i.e. about once every six months. Although patently it's not using standard components, we don't know how much of it is replaceable/upgradable until someone sees the actual hardware.


If it's a Thunderbolt iMac, yes, it can operate as a 'dumb' display through the thunderbolt port.

I wouldn't disagree with your analysis in general (nicely done) but you're contradicting yourself a bit here. Either you're after a workstation that you spend a lot of money keeping constantly state of the art by upgrading, or you're looking for a workstation with 'longevity' in terms of it being useful for a few years (say 4 years to write it off the asset list) without the extra expenditure. I don't see how those two requirements aren't mutually exclusive.

My guess is this thing will be internally revised at about the same rate other Macs currently are i.e. about once every six months. Although patently it's not using standard components, we don't know how much of it is replaceable/upgradable until someone sees the actual hardware.


If it's a Thunderbolt iMac, yes, it can operate as a 'dumb' display through the thunderbolt port.

I think I was going for 2 different aspects of longevity.
On the one hand, as all the parts (as far as we know, with the possible exception of the memory) are soldered on you're going to have to hope that all of the parts last for the lifetime of the machine you were hoping for when you bought it. In particular I'd be concerned about the lifetime of the flash storage as there didn't really appear to be any internal connectors on any of the pictures that were user serviceable.

With regards to upgrades I wouldn't be overly concerned about the CPU as the Xeons tend to have a rather longer useful shelf life than the consumer chips in terms of intel replacing them. I'm not so sure about the graphics cards though. Firstly you're stuck with Apples choice of FirePro's which could be a bit of a skunner if your apps are better optimised for Quadra/Tesla cards. Second, and as Apple pointed out in their presetnation, a lot more work is done by the GPU's these days than has previously been the case. That being true, if there was one aspect of the machine I'd want to be able to replace to keep it 'current' it'd be the graphics card.

So, to reiterate, there are two different aspects of longevity here. I'd want to be sure the machine would last for a minimum of 3 - 5 years without something fatal happening to a non-replaceable part.
For a regular worksation over that sort of timeframe I'd expect to be able to replace at least the graphics card to extend the useful life of the machine. SO, in terms of asset management you'd want the original asset to last long enough to be written off the books but also have the option of extending it's useful life without the expenditurre of a whole new machine.

Mine are the last before Thunderbolt. So I need to upgrade those first. Thanks for that.

IIRC you can get Thunderbolt docs that have various other ports on them that might make it usable. Having said that, it's got a HDMI port on it and you can get pretty ruddy decent monitors with HDMI on them for a relatively small amount of money now...

My iMacs are getting long in the tooth and I will be looking to update them next year. I have always wanted a Mac Pro and might be able to get just one iMac and use its screen to access the Mac Pro, though a screen might be worthwhile. I have not decided what to get and what configuration it will be yet.

How much upgradeability do you need?

I run an 8-core 3GHz MacPro that must be about 6 years old now, and it's shown no sign of running out of steam. I run Adobe CS5 and Logic 9 daily. Apart from adding some more RAM and a second drive for Logic projects, internally it's the same as when I originally bought it. I imagine that inability to run the latest OS (when ever that happens) and consequently software that requires it is going to spell the end for this Mac rather than it actually becoming too slow (which is the fate that befell all my previous computers).

Weren't the last iMacs without Thunderbolt made in 2010? That's barely 3 years ago! (8-p

One was running up against memory problems and always freezing. I had 8 Gb of RAM so thought that it would be enough. Well I fixed the address book and safari sync problems which were causing me all the memory problems, and since then my memory has been fine. It does have a tendency to get very warm, though it is running all day, and the screen puts out a tremendous amount of heat.

In addition because of my amnesia I use them to maintain order in my life. Through task management apps I organise my daily chores to remind me to do things that most people take for granted. So they are essential for me, so will replace them before it becomes impossible to do so.

This is the the thing though, isn't it?
For those of us not involved in industrial 3D modelling, film grading and motion graphics or dynamic fluid modelling or such - most computers are as powerful as we need them to be these days. We've reached that point, I'd say, where the available computing power (and I'm writing this on a 2010 i3 iMac) is more or less sufficient for what we need.

TBH, even for some of those applications, 12 cores is a lot. We do some very high grade number crunching where I work and it tends to split into two sorts - the 'desktop' sort where something like a top-spec Mac Pro as suggested would be fine, and the 'cluster' sort where you're talking an entire set of computers, with a total of something like 256 cores and several TB of RAM. You're not going to get a desktop computer right now that's even close to that, from Apple or anyone else. if you're looking at needing more than 12 cores, it's almost certainly better value for you to buy 4 or 5 much more basic machines and cluster them than it is to buy one whalloping great workstation (IMO, the Mac Pro may end up being over that threshold itself, although we won't know for certain until we see the prices).

The market for who would buy a full fat new model Mac Pro is probably quite small. The market for who would find that Mac Pro to be insufficient but who could find someone else's workstation that would be, is probably barely a dot on anybody's spreadsheet.

Arstechnica view

I agree with most of it, however I think his insistence that it's unreasonable to have less than 6 USB slots on a machine is a bit... odd.

I do agree. If you use the Apple keyboards you get an additional two USB ports on that. I use one for the mouse, and the other for the Griffin powermate. Apart from plugging in iPads and iPhones I do not need additional US ports.