[jan-jaap]

I hope the new MacPro can be had for less than that in 20 years time

FWIW: The price for a V12 card, in October 2006? $8000
Want a $5K monitor? How about a MONITOR FP 23IN SONY SDM-P232W/B for $4700?

Want to know what you could get for $1000? A 018-0490-002 CABLE ASSY VIDEO SPLITTER. That's right, a bloody cable.

Now, we all know what happened to SGI, so I'm not saying this a guarantee for long term success...

[Irinikus]

And the $ was worth allot more then!

[guardian452]

<p>

I don't have a lot to add to the technical discussions that have been taking place all over the Net, but I will say that I immediately thought of the SGI Prism moiré design when I saw the frontal view of the new Mac's vents.

I'm not gonna try to embed a movie but hopefully the link works. https://imgur.com/a/Kfff8ue
I find this hole pattern looks terrible in a still or 2d image. Too hard to see the depth.

Also, I attached a screenshot:    

[Irinikus]

I have decided that I will look into getting one of these machines in 2021, as Catalina is the last OS that will run on my Mac Pro 2013. (As the Mac Pro 2013 has worked so well for me.)

I will go for the 8-core option with one of their best graphics modules and 32GB of RAM. For my purposes, I prefer fewer cores operating at higher speeds. (I really hope that by then they offer it in a black color, like the rest of their Pro lineup.)

As far as gaming is concerned I think that the latest consoles are suitable to fulfill this requirement, as the PlayStation 4 Pro is not much worse than my gaming PC, at an absolute fraction of the cost.

[NoodlesMcPastaMan]

I absolutely love that they are bringing back the easily upgradeable aspect of it. The price, though... I mean I get that it is aimed at the whole "pro" market, but dang.

[jwhat]

Hi Irinikus,

my answer is simple, if you want the fastest and most powerful video processing Macintosh you can get then, the answer is yes the new Mac Pro is a beautiful thing.

Given the weight I would strongly recommend wheels and I even think it looks better with wheels.

My practical answer is that it is not good value, as I think I paid $4000 something for my Mac Pro 2012 back in 2013 (just before New Mac Pro came out) and I could readily afford it, while the new Mac Pro is simply not justifiable $$ wise to me.

On practical front that Mac Pro is now doing duty in the cellar:



I made the call to remove the Xserve 2009 Server as this was no longer supported by Apple and moved the Mac Pro to new duties as Time Machine Backup and rync server for other machines. It gets turned on once a month to run backup duties and is connected to the two SAS Storage Chassis for RAID'ed storage.

Meanwhile on the my desk I replaced the Mac Pro with a modest new Mac mini with 10 GbE, which cost me as much as the original Mac Pro 2012 (Apple prices are inflated) and it handles modest duties as home media server and all the things I did previously on Mac Pro are now on my MacBook Pro laptop, so my compute needs have not grown sufficiently over time to justify new Mac Pro.

If I was going to spend big $$ right now it would be on Flash Storage rather than compute, as storage is way more important to me than compute,

As a glimmer in the eye, the Mac Pro I would get would be a rack mount one, which I could keep in basement to run storage tasks and virtualised MacOS guests.

Funny how all my compute needs are being served by machines in the basement and not on the desktop nowadays.

Final comment, how I wish Apple and Nvidia would make up and kiss so you could put Nvidia GPUs back in Macs ;-)

If you want the best then go with a new Mac Pro, it will run rings around any old SGI (not sure if you saw this performance curve... of old SGI vs old Mac Pro and newish 32 Core X3650 Intel Server - which is the kind of performance you should see from a new Mac Pro).

That should wet for appetite for more compute grunt ;-)


Cheers from Oz,


John

[weblacky]

We had several Mac Pros over the years and I loved the expandability and very long support life...but the "New" Mac Pros took ALL OF THAT AWAY. The currently supported Mac Pros are now just Pixar/Hollywood rendering machines. That's exactly who it targets (post-production, movie effects, and real time video work) and that's it. Mac Pros were about third party hardware and growing/adding over time. This one, isn't. The real kicker (laugh if you want) was the fact that for such a HUGE case, they removed any ability to put mechanical 3.5" hard drives in it! That was the abolosulte deal-breaker.

Why? BACKUPS!!!

Of course I'd run an OS from SSD and such. but why would I care about my huge time machine backups being on spinning disk? Just mirror them or whatever in Soft RAID and you're fine. Nope, Apple makes the grand assumption if you're in the business they are targeting, you have a 10GbE driven NAS or something. You know some people just use a single station for a single worker, and maybe want to use time machine to version and backup both work and OS? Save finished work to offline storage or whatever? No harm, well impossible with this beast unless you love external drives...I don't. Apple has never well cooperated with external USB drives for proper sleeping (unless the drive firmware itself is aggressive) nor monitoring external drive health.

All the previous Mac Pros we used had a reasonable SSD for OS desktop stuff and two spinning disks in mirror mode for Time Machine. Never permanently lost data in the household. It work very well and being inside the case meant a native disk interface with proper power management and cooling. Why was that so hard?

So it's now onto a Mac Mini with an external heatsinked M.2 USB-C drive for Time Machine and we'll see how time treats us. I MIGHT have don't a basic new Mac Pro purchase if 3.5" disks could be fitted, no...we're done here. I have much more data in backup then I have in use (because versioning). So it stands to reason I need a larger backup solution that I need an OS partition. The Mac Pros were the last machines to understand that.

[ghost180sx]

Sure, lack of expandable disk storage options is telling. I mean, at least they could have offered industry standard 2.5" bays? Sure, you can install PCIe storage, but it's very expensive... Yes, they assume you'll just get external storage over thunderbolt or USB-C, but I liked it all being in one nice neat box.

Considering that the very base model MacPro starts at $7,500 (Canadian) with the lowest CPU and RAM offering (3.5GHz, 8-core Xeon W, 32GB RAM) -- despite it's insanely crazy design -- it's totally outclassed by a much cheaper PC, that can be installed with a much wider range of software and hardware for a fraction of the cost.

Fully, loaded, with every single option, will set you back a cool $68,107.98! Why the hell not, eh?

Sad really, because my MacPro1,1 has a permanent place at home on my desk as my daily machine. And I have no intention of replacing it any time soon. If I get bored of OS X, I boot up into Linux, and the system runs even faster and has even more device support.

I disagree that the new Pro is only for video or 3D professionals - it still has great scientific and engineering applications. In fact I would argue the average video or 3d professional probably can't afford this machine! And now it's available in a rack mount configuration too - something that suggests some people might be crazy enough to put one in a data center as a headless server-only appliance. Wow, expensive! For only the ultra-rich, with money to waste.

[jwhat]

Hi Irinikus & others,

as per this post: https://forums.irixnet.org/thread-4240.html , fours years after Irinikus asked the question I got my new Mac Pro "Cheese Grater".

Value wise I believe these are now great value. I am using the "grater" everyday and it is my "go to" box for most work.

Performance wise this machine is off the scale, see here for simple c-ray relative score benchmark (mostly a floating point test):



NOTE: For clearer view of relative performance, I have removed all but my highest performing SGI/MIPS machine (see "sphfract for slowest (Fuel) to fastest (2019 Grater)" for more details).

Mac Pro 2019 has best performance across all c-ray benchmarks (even better than Lenovo 32 core X3650 server).

Points on the new grater I think are great:
- PCIe Expansion, I moved ARECA ARC-1883 SAS RAID card out of "classic" Mac Pro 2012, into the new Mac Pro 2019. This was painless and all my backup volumes are available.
- Dual 10GbE - I left SmallTree 10GbE card in "classic" 2012 Mac Pro (now sold) as 2019 has dual 10GbE.
- Wheels, as I move my grater down into basement once a month to use it for back/archive host and the wheels make this easy (it is heavy machine)
- Stainless Steel Handles, these are so much easier on the hands than the old and very sharp aluminium handles of "classic" Mac Pro (again important due to weight)
- Grunt, this thing flys, it has equivalent performance to my dual cpu 32 core X3650, but runs silently under the desk
- Value, this cost me less than my Octane2, Onyx 350 & X3650 (even after adding wheels and swapping CPU and GPU)

For Apple Silicon Mac I will upgrade my Mac mini, as this is now just home media server.

The new grater is king of hill, apps wise I have: Adobe suite, Apple Media and Music applications, SW Development via lots of VMs (VMWare Fusion).

To keep things safe I got simple internal SSD drive bracket (~ USD $ 40) + Internal SATA cable via MODDIY (~ USD $15) + 8TB SSD for internal NVMe boot disk backup.

Only thing lost from "classic" is blu-ray burner, but now all my video is streamed via Mac mini, so that is ok.

Agree with you ghost180sx that $68,107 is completely insane price, but now you can get that type of config for less than USD 15,000 .

I know that Irinikus loves his "trashcans" , but I love the "grater".

So happy Mac'ing for me ;-)

Cheers from Oz,


jwhat/John.

[Irinikus]

This machine has grown on me over the years and is definitely on my to do list! :)

It’s the last Mac that you can really tinker with!