Will Apple Ever Update the Mac Pro?

[BoomR]

My "inside source" @ Apple tells me that there will be one final incarnation of the Mac Pro - processor upgrade and Thunderbolt, and then buh-bye to MP.

 

[tonymacx86]

Thought I'd revisit this topic- will Mac Pros be updated? And redesigned/re-thought altogether? Seems way too long for a simple spec bump at this point.

 

[Unrealized]

Well, I've always dreamed of a Mac Pro and it would be a shame if Apple would discontinue them.

 

[RoKsTaR]

I have a colleague who develops for apple and he mentioned a rumor floating around the office that Apple would create a desktop between imac and pro. In addition, they would eliminate consumer purchases of pro series desktops since most sales are for business level applications. However, the so called new setup would start the mac pros around 8k eliminating the lower end of them.

Based on that, I think what they're trying to do is just rebrand like this.

Laptops
imacs
New Consumer series - a slightly in between imac/pro series bordering into the low range mac pro, but reclassifying it as a high end consumer product.
Pro - Mid to highend mac pros where the sky is the limit with customizations

 

[Branhower]

I have a colleague who develops for apple and he mentioned a rumor floating around the office that Apple would create a desktop between imac and pro. In addition, they would eliminate consumer purchases of pro series desktops since most sales are for business level applications. However, the so called new setup would start the mac pros around 8k eliminating the lower end of them.

Based on that, I think what they're trying to do is just rebrand like this.

Laptops
imacs
New Consumer series - a slightly in between imac/pro series bordering into the low range mac pro, but reclassifying it as a high end consumer product.
Pro - Mid to highend mac pros where the sky is the limit with customizations

I've been wanting this for years; but an in-between does not fit into their computer product matrix. I think what they should do instead is make the graphics chip in the iMac desktop-class, and removable. With Thunderbolt; they don't have to worry about a video out, so a slot with a 90 degree adapter hooked internally to the display would work; and would be just as easy to upgrade as the RAM and storage. Cooling could either be integrated into the design of the case or through small vent holes in the back.

After doing this; they can take the Mac Pro into boss workstation status by switching back to the most powerful Xeons and only offering workstation-class cards with them.

 

[damndoe]

For regular Mac Pros, I think there will be an upgrade
* that costs VERY much ($2500) MINIMUM build, max CPU maybe something around 8000)
* that drastically outperforms enthusiast hardware (the stuff we might build here like i7 970, i7 990x 3770k, i7 3960x) in terms of CPU (not sure if in terms of RAM size)
* that uses the same old G5 case case it lowers costs to use the old design drastically, no need to redesign, it is still good looking
* that uses a mix of SSD (256/512GB) and regular harddrive - maybe some new File system (not sure if ZFS would be able to integrate an SSD and a regular hard drive for best speed and performance, like for web servers/file servers where IOPs matter but also size)

They might move the MacMini into two directions: New Apple TV (a TV with build in MacMini) and something like a Cube (a MacMini with discrete graphics good for home/office and gaming but not servers/workstations).

I can't see why they should drop the Mac Pro line, Mac Pros probably do not cut into MacMinis, iMacs etc very much... not if they are beyond $2500 at least. Mac Pros do not cost much R&D for them, they pick the same old case and power supply, they pick a well designed board (maybe some intel reference board), they pick some xeons some EEC RAM, all they might have to do is patch some graphics boards EFI to sell them for almost twice the price... - they might even use the drivers available for their macbook pros mostly... not much costs for a new product compared to iphone, ipad, macbook/air/pro.

 

[damndoe]

When custom builds surpass 32bit 22k / 64bit 25k Geekbench score they will for sure act
http://www.primatelabs.ca/geekbench/mac-benchmarks/

 

[moodogg7]

I agree with (rchristof's) comment regarding the mac pros being fazed out in favor of mobile devices. I'm hoping he is wrong though... I'm sure all the awesome new ivy-cpus will go into the i-macs, mac mini's and mac-books and we will (still) only have those devices to model our Hacintoshes after.. I dont see apple designing a mid-tower.. as they know that would be easily cloned.. and they probably would have the same problem they are having now in regards to sells and justifying the prices they charge for the mac-pro. I'm sure they will stay with small form and all in ones..

as far as having server racks... that could be a maybe, but people would probably go with a server solution from Linux as it is open-source, and overall cost would be far cheaper..

but it sure is fun building a Hacintosh for around 1000 and having it perform on par, or outperform a Mac-Pro with similar specs that apple charges $3500 for... now if we can just get some video cards with the thunderbolt built in so i can get one of those fancy $1000 monitors from apple

 

[harrydeo]

Apple will definitely upgrade the MacPro, I am not just being optimistic but speaking from various data points:

1. Top of the line is Top of the Line no less. Express Card was removed from 15' but it is still in 17' model. Thats just not it. If you look at thunderbolt. Thunderbolt would not interest apple if it was not for the Pro Market. They would have gone for USB 3 and make compatible iPhones and iPads. Thunderbolt allows you to do all kind of crazy things, they sell lot of thunderbolt accessories which only makes sense for Pro market (http://store.apple.com/us/search?find=T ... accesories)

2. Lion & Mountain Lion : Mountain Lion enables support for 6970 & 6990 cards. Why do that if you are only interested in mobile graphics card. Not only that latest version of OSX also packs various technologies which make a lot of sense if you are a pro customer. Such as the support GCD & OpenCL. Mountain Lion uses OpenCL all over even in installer. Mountain Lion is not windows 8 (which actually will consume less resource than Windows 7). It is a beast will only work on 64 bit EFI systems. They are upping the sys requirements. Since graphics everywhere they need more horse power moving forward. Even their iPad has a Quad core GPUs

3. Pro for Masses : Pro is not abandoned but Apple is aiming towards making Pro accessible to everybody. Thats why they didnt killed the FCP. A lot of other pro products are still being updated and sometimes given a new form.

4. Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs: Tim has taken up on things where Steve have not. So I'm sure Tim will listen to community.

 

[Frankylan]

i think the new MacPro's come with the official release of Mountain Lion
we will see this summer.