The Case for a True Mac Pro Successor

I am an owner of the "latest" Mac Pro, and I had the liquid cooled PowerMac G5 before that. I don't really know what to feel when it comes to the Mac Pro anymore. I used to compile WebKit a lot, and it takes forever (change one .h file and go get some lunch while you wait). When I got my Mac Pro 2 years ago it compiled it in under a minute I think. It was incredible. The best part was, back then, Xcode had the distributed builds feature, so I could go anywhere in my apartment with my Macbook Air and compiling was still crazy fast since the work was offloaded to the Mac Pro's 12 cores on my home network. Then they removed that feature from Xcode. I also had a two monitor workflow, but then they broke (for me) dual display support with Lion. The Mac Pro also doesn't support the latest and greatest graphics cards, so its not worth it in my opinion to upgrade them for Cinema 4D or games.<p>I don't even know if I mind really. The reality is that for the last 3 or 4 years, it feels like Apple has more and more been pushing me to not really love the computer experience anymore. When I think about my next "big" purchase, I will probably build a PC. I have never done that before in my life. I've exclusviely owned Mac. But "leaving" Mac OS X doesn't seem like a big deal to me anymore. I'll just be trading one set of frustrations (Messages, Notification Center, 5 minute long sleep wake up times, endless WiFi issues, etc) for another. At least I'll actually have fast graphics.<p>And Xcode will suck on my Macbook Air the same way it sucks on my Mac Pro today, so no real loss there, since I don't compile WebKit anymore. Again, its mainly just indifference now. I don't know if I miss the days when this stuff was fun, but Apple has certainly finally succeeded in making me see their computers as just tools.

Somewhat cynically, I think that Apple wants to be out of the tower business because you can't obsolete a tower every 9 months and get people to buy a new one. Towers have user-upgradable parts, can be serviced by laymen (and thus don't have the upsell opportunity when you have to bring it in to fix an issue), and are generally resilient against not being the latest-and-greatest.<p>In a Macbook Pro, by comparison, you are charged $200 for an extra 8GB of RAM and $500 for an extra 384 GB of SSD, not because the components or labor are worth that, but because you'll pay whatever they want you to, because you <i>can't</i> upgrade it later.<p>For better or worse, Apple is in the appliance business now. Buy your appliance, use it for a few months, then Craigslist it and buy the new one when it comes out. It's obscenely profitable and they have their consumer base trained to do it on command. Giving people something that they could keep current for a slim fraction of the cost of a new device is not in their interests.

I agree with the premise, but I think a larger, more capable iPad would actually be a more influential 'halo car', given today's Apple clientele.<p>An iPad with a 15" screen could display twice as much information and would allow for more on-screen controls. Apple could port the full versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote for iOS, but also the Pro Apps like Final Cut, Color, Aperture, and Logic. An iOS version of iBook Author could be a killer app. I've also long dreamed of a WYSIWYG authoring suite for making iOS apps on iOS (along the lines of Automator or Hypercard) – not for submission in the App Store, but to run on your own iOS devices and to share with friends and family.<p>Nice to have: add two Thunderbolt ports to the iPad Pro. Not only for connecting fast SSDs, but also so that you could link another iPad Pro. This would add a second screen, and for processor intensive tasks, the two CPUs could work together (think xGrid or GCD).

&#62; "Apple should keep pushing the limits of PC performance because it’s a company that loves personal computers."<p>I love reading Siracusa, and want to agree with him here, but this sentence stops me.<p>Apple clearly doesn't 'love' personal computers anymore. How much clearer could the signs be?<p>They took their engineers off Mac OS X and put them on iPhone OS. Their PC OS lagged and stagnated. The 'new' Mac Pro isn't the only insult to power users; OS X 10.8 itself is, too. It is the worst update in (Mac) OS X history, not only with serious show-stopping bugs, but also with new 'features' that are ground-breaking in how dumbed-down they are[1].<p>Their new love is closed, power-user-hostile, quasi-disposable consumer devices. Steve Jobs himself broke up with the personal computer in his last years, and the company followed suit.<p>[1]: LaunchPad, newly-crippled Expose, disabling extra monitors in fullscreen mode, double clicking hidden files doesn't open them, moron open-save dialogs, by-default iCloud file storage that prevents one app from being able to open another app's docs (even to attach as mail attachment), etc etc et

The metaphor would work but for the fact that smaller is a harder technical challenge than bigger. They're not skirting some kind of spiritual calling to make better technology by focusing on portable instead of workstations--if anything, they are doing exactly what the author wants. To equate pushing the envelope with losing money is very superficial reasoning.

Absolutely spot-on. The day Apple scuttles the Pro is the day they have fundamentally checked out of the computer industry.<p>(That mobile and portable is preposterously more profitable is beyond the point. PCI+x86 is an empire.)

Would Apple really be innovating by coming out with some smoking fast workstation? We know how to build these things: cram them full of top-of-the-line Xeon CPUs and tons of SSDs and GPUs.<p>The real problem is Apple's pro software is rotten, and throwing more hardware at it barely helps.

The analogy to Corvettes and Vipers is massively flawed. Automotive companies use sports cars to market their brand directly via racing and indirectly when the owners of production cars drive them down the street.<p>On the other hand, the days when speed was a major selling point of computers are long passed, and online, nobody cares whether I'm surfing HN with 8 Xeon cores of my desktop or one ARM core on my phone.<p>The only people who care about the MacPro are people who already want to buy Apple products. And an Apple logo which sits under your desk doesn't promote the brand in coffee shops and airports.

Trying to reconcile this post with the ghosts of past Unix workstation vendors, who tried to push the boundaries of what you could do with microprocessor-based computers, where spending tens of thousands of dollars per box was common.<p>Datapoint as example - a SGI Onyx could run you $250,000: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Onyx" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Onyx</a><p>Fast-forward to today, all the knowledge gained in building those high-end workstations have been distilled in the smartphones we have in our pockets now.<p>So for Apple, R&#38;D for its own sake or for controlling the narrative?

Apple <i>does</i> have a "halo car."<p>It's the Retina MacBook Pro.<p>Most people aren't willing to spend $1700+ for a laptop, with that case and that screen. They'll pick up one of the Airs or the old style MBPs. The Retina MBP is nice to look at when browsing at the store, and subconsciously, they know they'll have it in 3 years when the technology trickles down the product line.<p>To Apple, it's not about raw performance. It's about the total package. Which is unfortunate, because it means they're willing to make concessions in performance.

I run a HP Z620 Workstation with a bunch of processing power as my daily.<p>This is HP's 'Mac Pro'! I'm guessing it serves to keep the HP boffins doing cool things. It has 16 GB memory and a XEON on a daughter card (and the same again on the main board), which can be unclicked and slid out. All custom, and all different from the sister high-end box, the Z820.<p>This is serious bad-assery, and more power to HP for doing it.<p>I sincerely hope that Apple build a great new Mac Pro, and keep the flame of high-performance, no-compromise hardware alive.

Interestingly enough Google just introduced their halo device, the Chromebook Pixel. It seems somebody believes in the concept.

It's only been 6 years since Apple dropped 'Computer' from its name... (<a href="http://youtu.be/P-a_R6ewrmM?t=1h41m49s" rel="nofollow">http://youtu.be/P-a_R6ewrmM?t=1h41m49s</a> ).<p>Their 'halo' product must begin with a lowercase 'i'.

I say go the other way: Sell a version of OS X without video drivers. (ok, maybe a text console so it can cry piteously when it is broken and you can create an account or something if you have to.)<p>Remote desktop to manage; if you have a supported GPU it is 100% free for compute; only support chipsets and processors that Apple supports anyway. The engineering cost is minimal. Compatible hardware is the customer's problem. People that need horsepower for their render farms or whatever can build or buy the systems that make sense the month they need to buy. People that need to stick code in a hosting service can do that. Stop making me do <i>my</i> engineering twice; once for the native Mac OS, and once for the servers. Stop losing customers when the Pro line gets too long in the tooth. Give it a "no brainer" price. You aren't doing much engineering and it isn't canibalizing your human interaction machines, it protects them from migration.

What does Apple use for their in-house compute heavy tasks?<p>If there's an internal user base doing important work, then I think the professional line is safe. The whole "eat your own dog food" phenomenon.<p>Knowing no one, I can't guess what that situation is.

This blog post comments that "Consider Larrabee, Intel’s project to create a massively multi-core x86-based GPU. Rumor has it that Apple was working on integrating the technology into a Mac Pro. Intel eventually scuttled the project, but consider what would have happened if it had taken off, reshaping the GPU market in the process." and while Intel has not released a consumer oriented graphics card based on Larrabee, they have released a card called the Xeon Phi based on this tech. For the HPC world the card has the potential to compete well with nvidia and ati's gpu compute offerings. It's a specialized chunk of hardware for sure, but it is not a failure.<p><a href="http://insidehpc.com/2013/03/05/benchmarking-intel-xeon-phi-vs-sandy-bridge/" rel="nofollow">http://insidehpc.com/2013/03/05/benchmarking-intel-xeon-phi-...</a><p>As for an updated Mac Pro, all I can do is chuckle. Apple cares about selling high profit margin consumer electronics items to millions of consumers. Apple has long long ago dropped any concern for people who were "professional mac users" (see shake, final cut pro, etc. etc. etc.)

We know that there hasn't been a significant update to the line in ages. We also know Cook has publicly stated the line is not dead and that there will be something for pros this year. That's where facts end and speculation begins. For me, the big question is "what are they waiting for?"<p>I don't think it is a CPU; they could easily ship something with faster intel CPUs, and I doubt (understatement) they would release a pro line with Apple-designed ARM CPUs (that would certainly explain the wait, though).<p>So, what is it they are waiting for? Faster RAM? Unlikely. A terabyte SSD? I doubt it. Some retina 3D monitor? Unlikely; that could only cause delays if it were built into the hardware and I would not expect pro stuff to have a built-in display. Some interconnect (optical thunderbolt? Something wireless?) that will allow them to come up with a new form factor of a pro box? That, I think, is the most likely. But hey, let them surprise us.

The Halo Car is an interesting parallel, but one that I believe to be fundamentally flawed.<p>Here's the problem: Apple isn't building a Corvette, or a Viper, or even an LFA. It's building the world's fastest steam locomotive.<p>Is it impressive? By Jove, yes. Is it fast? Ridiculously so. Is it powerful? Let me count the ways.<p>Does it do something people want?<p>...<p>The problem with the Mac Pro is that it's a solution to a problem almost no one has. It uses server hardware to solve consumer problems. Great, but ... why? Is there any consumer app out there that really takes advantage of 12 cores? Seriously, what applications have been parallelized to that degree? Anything that benefits from 12 cores will benefit more from CUDA and massive GPU parallelization.<p>I like the idea of the Mac Pro. I like going balls out just for the hell of it. I just don't think it's a computer that anyone can really use.

I want to see whether Apple delivers on Tim Cook's alleged, cryptic comment. Given some of the very clever things Apple has done technically (GCD, neatly adding closures to C, Thuderbolt,...) I remain hopeful Apple has at least one nice surprise left for the Mac Pro faithful.<p>But don't assume it will be a new Mac Pro. Why not a new portable that can transparently offload compute-intensive operations to the cloud, and seamlessly utilize external acceleration via Thunderbolt?

I agree with the idea, but Apple is stuck with Intel's Xeon roadmap, which at this point multi-processor is lagging far behind the single processor lines.

A Mac Pro with a Xeon Phi would be a genius move--satisfying the core graphics market while not requiring the use of insanely priced general purpose Xeons, which are intended for the datacenter, not the PC. Most buyers don't want to run a database, they want to crunch pixels. Of course, they need Adobe on board. Given how shittily Adobe makes software, we could be waiting a while.

The iPad is Apple's "halo car." It's their RISC machine with in-house designed CPU running their in house designed OS. The Mac Pro is at best a assemblage of off-the-shelf PC parts in a nice case. Want to build the most powerful Mac Pro possible? Just buy the most expensive CPU/motherboard Intel is offering that day and pair it with a ton of RAM. Done before lunchtime.

How about something with a separate screen like a Mac Mini, but in a much bigger vertical profile chassis based on iMac internals, more CPU cores, liquid cooling or heat pipes, with lots of passive cooling using its increased surface area? (Like the area the screen would have taken up?)