If you are a designer, this is <i>absolutely the best</i> thing you can do to sky-rocket your market value over night:<p>Create a concept design from a popular product and put it on a slick landing page. It shows that you, as a designer, are proactive and think beyond designing standard stuff (like webpages or mobile apps).<p>Moreover, you are not limited by any client restrictions[1] which hurt your work (and portfolio), you learn 3D modelling if you haven't yet (it's not hard just time consuming), if you are lucky with social news sites you get so much free promo and finally, it's the eye-catcher on any CV.<p>[1] A classic and recommended post if we talk about clients restricting designers: <a href="http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell" rel="nofollow">http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell</a>
This kind of design is WAY more likely to come from a PC vendor than Apple. The 16 TB ports was definitely kind of a LOL moment.<p>I dig it. They are useful, but that can't be done with "standard components".<p>The whole idea of a flexible and upgradeable PC is kind of against the Apple "tightly coupled" software and hardware story. The reason that their user experience has historically (I haven't used a mac in about a decade) been so good was because they limit the available hardware for their testing purposes. They don't have a lot of choice in hardware, but what they do support works every time.<p>I don't know...I got off the Apple train a long time ago. I loved my Mac Pro, but it just wasn't for me.
I get that this is a concept not to be nitpicked to death for feasibility, and I love it. I'm also struck by the fact that a fucking computer has produced such heartache in people that somebody spent an ungodly amount of time on this labor of love.<p>I don't care how little of their revenue comes directly from selling Mac Pros, it's the feeling that could produce this response that they should be optimizing for, not small-ness, thin-ness, or port-deletion.
That's why this is a work of an aspiring designer, not an (apple) product designer: can someone point to a motherboard with 16 dedicated thunderbolts, such many lanes of PCIE, and answer why should 850 evos be used instead modern M.2 SSDs? The coolers/fans are OFF - they're not positioned above the GPUs, but above SSDs (which produce almost no heat at all), and the SSDs themselves are located around the thermal core triangles, why?
And GPUs are facing opposite directions, therefore, air streams are broken.
I know I've shouldn't be pissed that much by a stupid render, but this person could dedicate his time to make something meaningful and smart. Instead, he's just pushing the dribbblisation of the design forward. My call: this is stupid, meaningless work
> 50% of the site was black background + scrolling for me, but I think I can get the gist of it. Nice design + expansion capabilities, right?<p>Apple's Industrial Design group needs to get it through their skulls that folks doing <i></i><i>REAL</i><i></i> pro work still need traditional expansion capabilities. At the very least, pro users need to:<p>1) Have the ability to expand RAM<p>2) Have space for two video cards (ThunderBolt 3 + video card enclosures is <i>not</i> a desirable solution)<p>3) Have space for at least a couple internal hard drives<p>For some reason, I don't think this will ever happen because the end result would probably be bigger, noisier, and uglier than what the ID group would allow. But, man.. wouldn't it be nice to be able to purchase a base config Mac Pro 2 with one stick of RAM, shipped with integrated graphics and the user could drop in any graphics card(s) they wish?<p>Hackintoshes can work fine for some, but oftentimes we just want to be able to run software update without the fear that a patch will break our bread-and-butter making machines.
I appreciate it's just an industrial design concept, but the problem with off-the-shelf GPUs is that you need to route the DisplayPort connectors back to the motherboard in order to mux them with the Thunderbolt ports.<p>The Thunderbolt add-in cards have DisplayPort inputs for this purpose.<p>The GPU & motherboard vendors should agree on some extra headers to allow you to route these DP signals without ugly jumper cables on the outside of the case.
Real Mac Pro would be an aluminum "cheese grater" large quiet box that sits under the desk that I never see or hear unless I want to upgrade something.<p>The trashcan is at most Mac Mini Pro. Having thousand cables and external boxes sitting on your desk to expand it is not practical nor elegant, and gets out of date pretty fast. And quite frankly it's ugly as well.
Here's my concept design for what I want in a new Mac Pro: <a href="https://cdn.arstechnica.net/reviews/hardware/mac-pro-2g-review.media/macpro.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://cdn.arstechnica.net/reviews/hardware/mac-pro-2g-revi...</a>
Looks nice.<p>But where is all the bandwidth for 16 TB 3 ports supposed to come from? That’s 64 PCIe 3.0 lanes, mind you.<p>Adding to that, 32 PCIe 3.0 lanes for the graphics cards, 16 PCIe 2.0 lanes for the TB 2 ports, 2 PCIe lanes for the Ethernet ports, 2 PCIe lanes for the USB ports.<p>That’s 64 + 32 + 16 + 2 + 2 = 116 PCIe lanes<p>Guess not?
Just spent £2000 on a PC after 17 years of purely Apple because I wanted CUDA cores for my creative work.<p>If Apple had something like this as an option I'd have easily gone upwards of £4000 to foolishly stay within their ecosystem. Guess my wallet is better off in the universe where Apple doesn't want my custom.
Where would the CPU go?<p>I do understand the reluctance from Apple to built upgradable computers. They make their money on hardware sales, and an upgradable system would hurt those sales. At the same time their "Pro" gear simply isn't iterating fast enough, perhaps because not using standard components slows them down.<p>It's not Apples style, but it wouldn't hurt if they gave their professional customers a three year roadmap, just so people would know that they plan to move forward, and in which direction.
I smiled at "Standard components ... exceptionally futureproof". The way Apple are going the next mac pro will probably run an ARM CPU and have the RAM soldered on<p>Assuming they ever make another mac pro of course
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/tkwUICK.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/tkwUICK.png</a><p>I am glad to learn the dard Components are Exceptionally Futur.
I have to say, it's the first time I see a Peter Dinklage used as a unit of measure:<p><a href="http://pascaleggert.de/EPIC_specifications.html" rel="nofollow">http://pascaleggert.de/EPIC_specifications.html</a>
This type of design isn't useful. Round things don't fit neatly anywhere on a desk. Air cooling makes no sense when your design goal is high performance in a small space. What would really be useful is something 2.5" thick and as long and wide as necessary. Think about it you could lay it flat on your desk and put your screen on top of it, stand it up behind your screen, hang it on the wall behind your screen, bolt it to the under side of your desk, bolt it to the back of your desk, or bolt it to the side of your desk.
For a while, most non-Macbook Air 'ultrabooks' were hampered by the fact that they had to have an ethernet port, or I guess enterprises wouldn't buy them? It was weird. The whole entire computer ended up being designed around its biggest single constraint.<p>This is exactly what's going on here. "Bigger is better" is an attempted rationalization for the fact that graphics cards are determining the design of this computer. But then look at the Mac Pro: they solved a core problem of performance machines (cooling) with its weird looking design. There was a functional reason for its' looking like a turbine. Here, the rounded ends are pointless (haha design joke).<p>Edit: there's an interesting problem at the intersection of industrial design manufacturing process that this does solve for. The Mac Pro design process was obviously very involved, and it required lots of folks' attention. They obviously aren't paying attention in the same way, so the care that is needed to make something performant and beautifully designed isn't happening, and the releases aren't happening. This guy's design does an end-run around Apple-like industrial design, and in choosing compatibility with off-the-shelf stuff, probably makes the product more likely to be relevant to folks in the future than Apple's Mac Pro, which is just languishing in long product update cycles.
Are 16x TB3, 4x TB2 AND 4x USB3 actually achievable with current/near-future hardware?<p>If Apple were to implement this, I'd imagine it would be N x TB3/USB3 USB-C format ports, an ethernet port and maybe HDMI (though a dongle would possibly negate that – if 2.1 can be achieved that way)<p>Otherwise, looks good to me.
I can dig this, but the next Mac Pro needs to compete with the current line of HP Z840:<p><a href="http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetPDF.aspx/c04400043.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetPDF.aspx/c04400043.pdf</a>
Instead of fancy design, I would rather see some fairly boring box that would enable Apple to use almost off-the-shelf hardware. Kind of hackintosh, but made by Apple. This way it would be much easier for them to bring regular (yearly) hardware refreshes.
Only 24GB of RAM?<p>The current Mac Pro officially supports 64GB and 3rd parties offer upgrades to 128GB.<p>Even the 2006 models can be upgraded to 32GB.
I like the size of this. The expandability of the machine is nice considering the current lack of refresh on current apple desktop hardware. I'm not holding my breath though.<p>I have the old mac-pro (cheese grater), and it was remarkably expandable (and easy to do so). Its remarkably heavy (theft deterrent).<p>You can go see what the hackintosh people are building with commodity hardware:<p>User Builds:
<a href="https://www.tonymacx86.com/forums/user-builds.28/" rel="nofollow">https://www.tonymacx86.com/forums/user-builds.28/</a>
Somehow the grey metal Mac Pro case shown beside the current Mac Pro and this Mac Pro concept design looks to me much better and functional than any of the other two.<p>It makes a much more professional, high-quality, clean impression and has definitely the potential to house at least the same if not more hardware than the cyclindric ones.
Looks nice but I don't think that's practical (or realistic).<p>That's way too many USB ports, SSDs on one machine.<p>BTW for devs out there that need that much horsepower, what do you do? (I understand needed 32 GB of ram which was not available in the latest MacBook pros, but when do you need that much storage?)
Gigabyte announced a similarly shaped product last week at CES.<p><a href="http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=6151#kf" rel="nofollow">http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=6151#...</a>
Problem being that the current Mac Pro is already the 2nd <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Pro" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Pro</a>
Funny enough, the thing that had me thinking the most was the double ethernet ports. What would that be for? Two different networks? When one cuts out you just switch to the other one?
Looks great... just needs 10GbE instead of 1Gb. Add an SFP port and a RJ45 if all you got is a 1Gb or want to try your hand at getting 10GBASE-T working.
While I really like the aesthetics of this, I think it still suffers the same problems as the current Mac Pro.<p>It needs more PCI card slots. It needs to support more than two GPUs. To suppprt that it's also going to need one helluva power supply... it needs its workstation credibility back more than it needs a beautiful design.<p>I still think the previous generation of Mac Pro look great. They'd look even better in Space Gray.
The Mac Pro design was fun to look at, but the concept firearms on this site were the most impressive to me. Well thought out and engineered from a concept perspective, addressing pain points for the customer that requires some pretty serious knowledge. I'm surprised somebody hasn't tried to manufacture the Thor A1 at this point, as they seem to fit a pretty sizable PPW market.
I think the next Mac Pro will need to fit within the Rack.<p>Basically merging the Xserve and Mac Pro together. It will need Dual CPU and Dual GPU space.<p>But May be the consumer Mac and iPhone is simply too large of a market, where even small minor profitable business like Server and Pro market are being ignored. But sometimes it isn't about profits, but ecosystem.
Looks great, it will take one hell of a custom riser to orient those video cards like that. <a href="https://hardforum.com/forums/small-form-factor-systems.102/" rel="nofollow">https://hardforum.com/forums/small-form-factor-systems.102/</a> has the best collection of Super small custom form factors in the world.
I don't want a system that "anticipates" what I may need. I want a system that allows me to update and upgrade easily based on what my needs are, and how they may change. In that way, the cheese-grater Mac Pro was ideal. Apple needs to get back to that mode for the <i>desktop</i> Power user.
Not bad. Reminded me of the internal arrangements in the MSI Nightblade MI2, a pleasant small desktop gaming machine. You can buy some of them for under 1k USD.<p>( <a href="https://www.msi.com/Desktop/Nightblade-MI2.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.msi.com/Desktop/Nightblade-MI2.html</a> )
Great design work, as for the idea, I don't think Apple would roll with the alien/spaceship/ninja vibe <a href="http://d.pr/i/jzcl" rel="nofollow">http://d.pr/i/jzcl</a>
GTX 1080? That seems like an unlikely choice to me. Apple prefer AMD GPUs, not NVidia's.<p>The GTX 1080 is also part of NVidia's consumer line, whereas the current Mac Pro has FirePro chips, which are from AMD's workstation graphics line.
This looks cool...but the inside of the machine is so unlike Apple. It is scary and futuristic in an Alienware way. Apple's design (even inside) is always more human and approachable.
Nice work, but it looks like it's transitioning from a small circular garbage can to a rectangular garbage can. The original aluminum Mac Pro shrunken down would have been the ideal design IMO.
looks great but will never happen -- the mac pro is not a priority for Apple -- sometimes I wonder, what, if anything outside of the iPhone, really is a priority for them.
cool but if you can upgrade the gpu and storage, than you should also be able upgrade the cpu, ram and psu? at that point, it's just the old ATX mac pro design
No USB-C? also, what's the point of including the Thunderbolt 2 ports, I thought Thunderbolt 3 was backwards compatible. Sweet design other than that.
The next Mac Pro will just be really really thin, have no ports, and gets it's power wirelessly from a mat underneath it, but no batteries. It'll have 8 cores and max out at 13g of ram
Oooh, an artist spend 20 minutes with PhotoShop and now Apple can just take his pretty pictures and start pumping out new computers. It's not like anyone needs to actually create an actual prototype, source components, set up manufacturing, market and deliver anything.