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Jan 21, 2016, 11:24 AM

Hey,

it's maybe a somewhat stupid question, but I wonder if the new Mac Pro really ever stuck with people. Has it become part of their normal lives? I mean, the Mac Pro was sort of a miracle when it was originally announced. It was really small and people wondered whether it really worked and if it was truly as powerful as announced. It's Made in the USA and it's sort of expensive. Did it just replace the old Mac Pro?

Didn't they take the old Mac Pro into a new direction, increasing prices so much? They say it costs as much as a just-as-fast PC, but the PC is much bigger and doesn't look so nice and some parts may be worse.
Back many years, we as mostly normal people with some work at home used to buy a PowerMac and it was really normal. It was sorta expensive, but that was alright, we normally had them for many years. We wouldn't buy the Mac Pro now.

My dad thinks of getting a new Mac and sometimes thinks of getting a new Mac Pro, but it costs so much!

Any thoughts?
Greetings,
PeterParker

P · Jan 21, 2016, 12:16 PM

If you used to buy a Mac Pro for the home, you should get an iMac that is not the cheap model. The MP is great if you need lots of cores or dual GPUs for compute, but that is a very specific case.

turtle777 · Jan 21, 2016, 12:22 PM

Rule of thumb: if you are not sure if you need the Mac Pro, you don't need the Mac Pro.

-t

ghporter · Jan 21, 2016, 09:22 PM

I'm still very happily using a 2007 iMac. I might have benefitted from more cores now and then for one task or another, but overall it would have been wasteful to go with something much more powerful than the iMac.

More cores, more storage, and essentially more speed are great - when you need them. Otherwise they take up space, cost more, and are potential sites for failures.

I'd like to be able to afford a fully loaded Mac Pro for my day to day computer, but I wouldn't be able to take advantage of its capabilities. I'll stick with something that gets my jobs done, and that doesn't make me think I could have spent the money better paying off my mortgage.

andi*pandi · Jan 22, 2016, 01:57 PM

My work switched us from towers to iMacs, instead of getting the Mac Pro. I like the iMac screen, but it's been buggy.

At home I am collecting old tower stonehenge. Have to find a use for them.

CharlesS · Jan 26, 2016, 12:49 AM

Used to be that you'd get a Mac Pro for the expansion, as it was the only remaining Mac model that had internal PCI-Express slots, storage bays, and the like. Nowadays, the MP is just as closed up as everything else, so might as well save your money and get something cheaper. Some people may say iMacs, but frankly, I'd rather have a laptop and hook it up to an external display when at home, as the portability can be really nice to have.

Of course, there do exist external PCIe chassis now that connect via Thunderbolt. The bad news is that a lot of them cost so much that it eats up the money you saved by not getting a Mac Pro (although there appears to be one from OWC that's cheaper than the rest). The good news is that if you've got some hardware that requires a slot, you can at least do it, and in some ways, it's perhaps a bit liberating that you don't need a full tower just for that anymore.

Of course, then there's the thing that Thunderbolt stuff hasn't been selling very well over the last few years, and you never know if Apple might decide to stop including it on their machines one day...

GENERAL_SMILEY · Feb 2, 2016, 03:37 PM

i liked it, but somebody swiped it from my place on Christmas day. There are three or four in this ad agency I've working in recently, but as nobody seems to do anything, hard to tell if being used especially - probably 1 for every hundred iMacs.

chris v · Feb 4, 2016, 12:17 PM

I don't have any use for that sort of GPU power. Am pretty happy with my 2008 Mac Pro, but will probably update to a 27" iMac when it wears out because I'll need a new display anyway. Was considering getting a used 2012 Mac Pro tower, but the lack of Thunderbolt makes that kind of a dead-end machine from the get-go. I'm torn, though. I really like having all the internal drive expansion, but with 1 TB SSD, I would probably be fine between that & the external enclosures I already own.

P · Feb 5, 2016, 09:19 AM

Having the drives internal is nice, but you get used to having them external rather quickly. Also, file sizes aren't growing like they used (because mobile networks), so you don't need a bigger HD three times in the lifetime of a computer like you did ten years ago.

subego · Feb 14, 2016, 11:58 PM

I'm in the group Apple completely hosed. After Effects needs cores, and a ****ton of RAM.

panjandrum · Feb 18, 2016, 01:23 PM

I have seen one of the new so-called MacPros, ever, in an Apple store. On the other hand, I still see a ton of the real MacPros, and experienced a small panic-purchase frenzy among clients when the new model was announced; people panicking to buy a real MacPro that is, before they were all gone. It has by no means become widely accepted, at least in my area, because it was pretty obviously designed by a moron with no idea whatsoever what actual professionals need.

The only way to build a true MacPro these days is to build a Hackintosh. I recently put together a tower with all Hackintosh recommended components. Currently has 2TB storage, 16gb ram, 8 internal 3.5" drive bays. 2 Internal optical drive bays, 2 internal 2.5" drive bays (for SSDs), Core i7, liquid cooling, 3 case fans, 2 GPU fans, 1 PS fan, 1 CPU fan, room for up to 2 more case fans in the event additional cooling is later needed. The list just goes on and on and includes all well-regarded and reliably components (not an el-cheapo PS or MB etc.) Does it look as nice as the real MacPros, no, but I did choose a reasonably attractive case. Will it be a pain to keep up-to-date for the OS? Yes. Then again, it has insane upgrade potential and cost a total of just under $1300, which included a decent keyboard and mouse. Go out and compare the cost of installing, say, 8x4TB internal drives in that system compared to 8x4TB external drives on the so-called "MacPro"... Compare the cost of upgrading memory. Compare the cost of upgrading the video-card (oh, wait, never mind...)

IMHO the new MacProMiniJoke is the purest embodiment of everything that's gone so dreadfully wrong at Apple.

P · Feb 19, 2016, 06:33 AM

The new Mac Pro is a perfect example of how Apple used to make products in the Steve heyday: Define a category that you want to make a product for and make the best possible product for it. If someone outside one of your categories wants to buy a product from you, tough. Unfortunately you are now in that category.

The box you have built was never a Mac Pro, but it is almost perfectly that infamous thing, the xMac. Which is fine, I have something quite similar that I game on, but it isn't a workstation. Simply backing off from a Xeon E5 to a Core i7 (at that price it is the i7-6700 or similar, not the E line) is a quite big saving that drops the capabilities that you get (one quarter the max RAM, no ECC, half the memory bandwidth, only 4 cores max). I could live with a lot of that, but it is hardly a direct Mac Pro replacement.

subego · Feb 19, 2016, 01:47 PM

It's hard for me to justify Hackintosh OS woes over just using After Effects on Windows.

panjandrum · Feb 22, 2016, 05:20 PM

Originally Posted by P

The new Mac Pro is a perfect example of how Apple used to make products in the Steve heyday: Define a category that you want to make a product for and make the best possible product for it. If someone outside one of your categories wants to buy a product from you, tough. Unfortunately you are now in that category.

The box you have built was never a Mac Pro, but it is almost perfectly that infamous thing, the xMac. Which is fine, I have something quite similar that I game on, but it isn't a workstation. Simply backing off from a Xeon E5 to a Core i7 (at that price it is the i7-6700 or similar, not the E line) is a quite big saving that drops the capabilities that you get (one quarter the max RAM, no ECC, half the memory bandwidth, only 4 cores max). I could live with a lot of that, but it is hardly a direct Mac Pro replacement.

Not to nitpick (well, OK, it's a nitpick, I admit it). The new MacPro is in no way a perfect example of what Apple built in Steve's heyday. It's the opposite. In Steve's heyday the MacPro was a computer that suited actual professionals across a broad range of what "professional" meant. The new one only suits a single type of professional as far as I can tell, and even then it's just not a good value considering it lacks all of the expandability and upgradability of the old one (unless you want to spring for expensive external expansions; something no pro-system should require).

Just my opinion I suppose, but IMHO an inexpensive hackintosh MacPro embodies the Pro market vastly better than that travesty that Apple now builds...

OreoCookie · Feb 22, 2016, 09:46 PM

Originally Posted by subego

I'm in the group Apple completely hosed. After Effects needs cores, and a ****ton of RAM.

How much RAM do you need? Even the iMacs can accommodate 64 GB these days. And if you need tons of RAM and tons of cores, how is the new Mac Pro letting you down?

subego · Feb 28, 2016, 03:25 PM

Originally Posted by OreoCookie

How much RAM do you need? Even the iMacs can accommodate 64 GB these days. And if you need tons of RAM and tons of cores, how is the new Mac Pro letting you down?

With a longer than two year update cycle.

I can't justify dropping $12K on hardware that old.

subego · Feb 28, 2016, 11:27 PM

As to how much RAM I need, there really is no limit.

After Effects does what's called a "RAM preview". It renders frames and then loads them into RAM. The more RAM I have, the longer the clip can be.

64GB is less than a minute of (uncompressed) 4K playback.

With cores, each core attacks a different frame. As long as I don't hit an I/O bottleneck, the more cores, the faster my renders. Of course, each core needs its own hunk of RAM.