[goMac]

The prediction of the 29th is looking good. Intel released their Mac Penryn development kit today.

[musicforme]

Originally Posted by goMac 

The prediction of the 29th is looking good. Intel released their Mac Penryn development kit today.

I hope you're right. I went ahead and signed up tonight for the Apple Developer Connection Student membership tonight. I figure worst case scenario is that the Pro isn't updated until MWSF and I'll some software I can't use until then.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by musicforme 

I hope you're right. I went ahead and signed up tonight for the Apple Developer Connection Student membership tonight. I figure worst case scenario is that the Pro isn't updated until MWSF and I'll some software I can't use until then.

Hm? Not sure I understand. The Student membership lasts a year, so you've got a year from now to get your Mac Pro... Doesn't include much in the way of software either.

[musicforme]

Originally Posted by goMac 

Hm? Not sure I understand. The Student membership lasts a year, so you've got a year from now to get your Mac Pro... Doesn't include much in the way of software either.

While what you wrote is true, you get one heck of a discount on the purchase of one Mac. Look at the pricing in th ADC store: The Apple Store (U.S.)

[goMac]

Originally Posted by musicforme 

While what you wrote is true, you get one heck of a discount on the purchase of one Mac. Look at the pricing in th ADC store: The Apple Store (U.S.)

Right, I actually held an ADC Select Membership that expired this month. I'm going to wait until the new ones come out, do the math, and decide whether renewing my account or using an educators discount is a better deal. (One advantage of the educators discount is that I can pick up the Mac Pro in an Apple Store.)

[Simon]

So much for the Nov 29 rumors. Usually the Apple store would have already gone down and come back up by now.

Instead, nothing.

It's going to be a long December for potential MP buyers.

OTOH the day isn't over yet.

[MallyMal]

lol let's email Steve Jobs this thread.

In all seriousness, and I've said it before, the only reason we have these "Blues" is because we allow Apple to kick us around. Instead sitting here whining for Apple to do something why don't we take action and find a way of getting what we want and need? If Apple still doesn't listen then we don't buy their ****. I mean, come on people, we has this big 8 page thread but no one really seems to want to find a solution. Where are theses 8 pages going to be once Apple releases something, forgotten until Apple decides to bullshit around again?

[ninahagen]

Originally Posted by Simon 

OTOH the day isn't over yet.

Its only 6:30 am west coast, 9:30 am east coast. Apple is on PST, so wouldn't it be a few hours for any announcement?

[awcopus]

Originally Posted by MallyMal 

Where are theses 8 pages going to be once Apple releases something, forgotten until Apple decides to bullshit around again?

This thread will remain valid until the majority of those who post in it no longer have the Mac Pro Waiting Blues. Those blues go away once people take delivery of their new Mac Pros.

Not when Apple releases them. Not when people order them. When people actually receive them.

This thread may still be around months from now.

[Bwa]

I've been waiting for new Mac Pros since August or so. I got tired of waiting and bought a MacBook Pro a few days ago since I needed a new laptop, too. The MacBook Pro feels a heck of a lot faster than my dual-core Pentium D 3.0 ghz Windows XP desktop--so much so that I have been tempted to buy a Mac Pro anyway and ignore the rumor sites for a year. :-) I sold my G5 a few months ago and am getting ready to sell my Intel iMac.

And the waiting continues...

[tadd]

Originally Posted by MallyMal 

lol let's email Steve Jobs this thread.

So he's probably reading this already and laughing at us as he schedules the Mac Pro release on a Friday night or something.

wimper.

My wife told me if I bought the high end PowerMac I couldn't have a new computer for 4 years. I agreed and bought the dual G5. That was 50 months ago.

tick tick tick.

[eggman]

Originally Posted by Reggie Fowler 

i just found out from a little birdie that they are planning on releasing the new machines Nov 29th.
Sweet!

That little birdie wouldn't be a crow that you'd care to eat, would it?

[mduell]

They're going to wait for Nehalem in 3Q08.

Has anyone seen the results of dropping the new 5400 Xeons into the current Mac Pro? The 5000 series chipset supports them, but most boards with that chipset need a firmware update.

[Aegis]

Originally Posted by mduell 

They're going to wait for Nehalem in 3Q08.

You don't really think they'll wait that long do you? At the minimum, they have to update GPU/RAM/HD's before then. If they leave it untouched until 3Q 08, I'll end up imploding.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Aegis 

You don't really think they'll wait that long do you? At the minimum, they have to update GPU/RAM/HD's before then. If they leave it untouched until 3Q 08, I'll end up imploding.

My comment was tongue in cheek. I'm surprised that they would wait until December to announce them, but at this point I view December as the most probable release date.

[goMac]

I've got to join the MWSF camp. I don't think Apple would release anything in December.

[eggman]

It would be a lot easier to be intellectually detached and even amused by all of this if my distinguished but elderly G5 weren't looking so grey around the muzzle.

My prediction about the release of the new machine is this: once I am forced to reconcile myself to replacing my PowerMac and actually begrudgingly do so - once that new hardware is sitting on my desk... only then will Apple update the MacPro line.

Therefore, it's probably in y'all's best interest to commence convincing me that this is something I need to do, and soon... because I'm holding up new iron for the rest of you.

Congratulations Apple: you've made a nihilistic solipsist of me.

[ninahagen]

Originally Posted by eggman 

It would be a lot easier to be intellectually detached and even amused by all of this if my distinguished but elderly G5 weren't looking so grey around the muzzle.

My prediction about the release of the new machine is this: once I am forced to reconcile myself to replacing my PowerMac and actually begrudgingly do so - once that new hardware is sitting on my desk... only then will Apple update the MacPro line.

Therefore, it's probably in y'all's best interest to commence convincing me that this is something I need to do, and soon... because I'm holding up new iron for the rest of you.

Congratulations Apple: you've made a nihilistic solipsist of me.

You have a way with words... beginning with "grey around the muzzle"

[Simon]

Yep. The "sweet little birdie" just had a major crash landing. Has there ever been a rumor published on this board first that actually turned out to be true? Thought so.

[SierraDragon]

Originally Posted by eggman 

...distinguished but elderly G5 weren't looking so grey around the muzzle... ...nihilistic solipsist...

Nice.

-Allen Wicks

[iSavant]

... " Endeavor to Persevere " ... (Chief Dan George, Outlaw Josie Wales)

I liked the " forced to reconcile "

[Drakino]

/me continues to wait impatiently.

It wouldn't be so frustrating if Apple would have at least knocked the price down every once in a while. Watching the keynote when they released it, they compared the stock Mac Pro $2499 config to a Dell Precision 690 config that cost $3448 at the time. Speccing out the Dell now runs at $2948, but that includes a 3 year warranty. With Applecare, the Mac Pro is $2748, so Apple still has the cost advantage, but it's much smaller then it was when the Mac Pro came out in August 2006.

[imitchellg5]

Originally Posted by ninahagen 

Its only 6:30 am west coast, 9:30 am east coast. Apple is on EST, so wouldn't it be a few hours for any announcement?

They are on PST as far as announcements and events go.

[ninahagen]

Originally Posted by imitchellg5 

They are on PST as far as announcements and events go.

Oops, typo, that's what I meant... fixed it in the original post.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Drakino 

It wouldn't be so frustrating if Apple would have at least knocked the price down every once in a while. Watching the keynote when they released it, they compared the stock Mac Pro $2499 config to a Dell Precision 690 config that cost $3448 at the time. Speccing out the Dell now runs at $2948, but that includes a 3 year warranty. With Applecare, the Mac Pro is $2748, so Apple still has the cost advantage, but it's much smaller then it was when the Mac Pro came out in August 2006.

Except Dell is now offering the new quads...
Apple base Mac Pro + 3Ghz quad + APP = $4246
Dell base Precision T5400 + 3Ghz quad + 250GB HDD = $4038
The Dell has a better graphics card for professional work, but the graphics cards (low-end gamer in the Mac Pro, low-end pro in the Precision) are hard to compare.

[Drakino]

I was doing an exact comparison against what Apple did with the Dell box to get an idea of how much the older components had dropped in price. With the newer chips, there are plenty of configs to make a Mac Pro not look so good on the price field, but it is interesting to see that with the same components, Apple is still ahead in the price advantage.

I'd still be happy to see a Mac product actually use the desktop line of Core 2 chips, but thats even more wishful thinking beyond Apple keeping the Mac Pro updated.

[tadd]

Originally Posted by Drakino 

I'd still be happy to see a Mac product actually use the desktop line of Core 2 chips, but thats even more wishful thinking beyond Apple keeping the Mac Pro updated.

I would like Apple to make an expandable single CPU, single optical. single SATA HD system. The HD and optical drive should be replaceable like the Mac Pro is now. It should have

• a pair of 8xPCIe slots,
• room for 4 memory DIMMs,
• external eSATA,
• gigabitEthernet,
• 2 Firewire400(1 front, 1 back),
• 6 USB2 connections (2 front, 4 back),
• bluetooth,
• WiFi,
• Motherboard graphics with the option of adding a high end graphics card into an 8xPCIe slot.

The point would be to be on par with the iMac but headless and adding user swappable components, eSATA and PCIe expansion.

I'm still waiting to replace my dual G5 but I really don't need the power of the high end machine. I'm very tempted to just go now and buy the $2000 Mac Pro but since October when my budget became available it has looked like such a short time before that machine could be better/faster.

[goMac]

Anyone else remember the days when a new Powermac could be had for around $1300?

[tadd]

Originally Posted by goMac 

Anyone else remember the days when a new Powermac could be had for around $1300?

If I recall they were in the $1700 price range when I bought my G4/400Mhz and slightly higher when I bought my G4/dual 1Ghz. There was a brief time after the PowerMac G5 came out that the G4 was cheaper. Is that what you mean?

[goMac]

Originally Posted by tadd 

If I recall they were in the $1700 price range when I bought my G4/400Mhz and slightly higher when I bought my G4/dual 1Ghz. There was a brief time after the PowerMac G5 came out that the G4 was cheaper. Is that what you mean?

Technically the G4 at $1300 was after the G5 came out. However, the last G4 revision shipped at $1500.

[glideslope]

I remember paying $1399 for my II E in 1983 with the mighty Moto 6502. Still have it and all the paperwork.

[imitchellg5]

Originally Posted by goMac 

Technically the G4 at $1300 was after the G5 came out. However, the last G4 revision shipped at $1500.

I remember that. My uncle bought four for his studio, then got ticked off when he turned one on and found out how loud they were. He had four in one room! It was horrible.

[Leuey]

Looks like the NVidia 9 series may be launched in Feb (not confirmed - so big grain of salt). It would be classic of Apple to finallly update the Macpro with the 8 line only to have the 9's come out a month later...

I'm waiting to buy a couple of these things - but I guess I'd rather wait longer than be using a 2 generation behind gfx card a year from now (again....)

-G

[svtcontour]

Thats probably it, they are waiting for the new cards to come out so they can launch the Mac Pro with the older series

[ninahagen]

Originally Posted by svtcontour 

Thats probably it, they are waiting for the new cards to come out so they can launch the Mac Pro with the older series

While svtcontour's optimism is appreciated, I think they are going to launch the new MPs alongside Nehalem in Q3 1998 with an exclusive, blazing 4 Ghz 16-core CPU, an Apple-only 64-bit edition of Photoshop that can address 16 gigs of RAM, the RAID card standard, a special edition Seagate 1TB 30k rpm SAS hdd, all with an unremovable, non-replacable MDA:

"The first video card, which was released with the first IBM PC, was developed by IBM in 1981. The MDA (Monochrome Display Adapter) could only work in text mode representing 25x80 lines in the screen. It had a 4KB video memory and just one color." (Wikipedia)

Once Apple produces a patch with a software workaround for the text mode only problem, we will able to play Pong at 4 frames per second. But, fortunately for us graphics pros, we will be able to save big money (almost 2 billable hours!!!) in a place where it doesn't matter in the slightest: the video card.

I want to throw up.

[Big Mac]

Originally Posted by goMac 

Anyone else remember the days when a new Powermac could be had for around $1300?

The low-end G4 never got quite that cheap. IIRC, they hit the $1600 price point with the low-end MDD. It was nice that Apple used to care enough to offer a cheap tower.

[Bwa]

Originally Posted by Big Mac 

The low-end G4 never got quite that cheap. IIRC, they hit the $1600 price point with the low-end MDD. It was nice that Apple used to care enough to offer a cheap tower.

Sorry, but you're wrong. When Apple released the G5s, the G4 MDD was available for ~6 months w/ a single 1.25 GHz processor for $1299. These were the last towers that could boot Mac OS 9.

But yes, the G4s were $1599 or so for the low end tower(s) for quite a while across updates.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by Big Mac 

The low-end G4 never got quite that cheap. IIRC, they hit the $1600 price point with the low-end MDD. It was nice that Apple used to care enough to offer a cheap tower.

According to Mactracker, the final MDD's started at $1500. The post-G5 Power Mac G4's were $1300.

[luke55]

Many users are waiting for the new Penryn-based Mac Pro. If the new Xeon Penryn is now officially available, Apple did not release the new revision for the Mac Pro, as one could have expected it.
Part of the answer might be lying in the recent release by Intel of the new Software Development Products for Mac OS X. While some might have been thinking that it will only bring support for SSE4, it seems that one can expect larger performance gain especially with Pro-oriented applications if they are recompiled with the new software development tools.
So, Apple might be recompiling some of its Pro applications with the new compiler and libraries in order to offer a new Mac Pro models taking full advantages of the Penryn and its faster FSB. Last but not least, the new compiler allows a much better support of n processors-based hardware, something really important for the 8 core-based Mac Pro.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by luke55 

Part of the answer might be lying in the recent release by Intel of the new Software Development Products for Mac OS X. While some might have been thinking that it will only bring support for SSE4, it seems that one can expect larger performance gain especially with Pro-oriented applications if they are recompiled with the new software development tools.

Intel's software development kit does not support Cocoa, ruling out using it for any Cocoa based applications.

[Big Mac]

Originally Posted by Bwa 

Sorry, but you're wrong. When Apple released the G5s, the G4 MDD was available for ~6 months w/ a single 1.25 GHz processor for $1299. These were the last towers that could boot Mac OS 9.

But yes, the G4s were $1599 or so for the low end tower(s) for quite a while across updates.

Sorry, that slipped my mind - special case though.

[Bwa]

Originally Posted by goMac 

Intel's software development kit does not support Cocoa, ruling out using it for any Cocoa based applications.

This is not entirely true. The Intel compiler can be used to build static libraries that can be linked against code compiled with gcc. No, you won't be able to use the Intel compiler for Objective-C, but high performance bit pushing won't be implemented in Obj-C anyway.

[luke55]

As many of our readers requested additional information regarding the date for the launch of the future Mac Pro, we decided to ask our sources for details. Of course, we could not cross confirm all information, but we know that they should be reliable:

Unlike our expectations, one will have to wait for MWSF keynote on January 15th to have Steve jobs announcing the transition to Penryn processors, the Mac Pro being the first. reasons for this delay are numerous, but we were reporting yesterday about some of them:

- Apple is actively working on Leopard to benefit as much as possible from the recently released Intel Mac OS X compiler and libraries, including SSE4 support. Mac OS X 10.5.2 should be released for the keynote and fully takes advantages of the last Intel compiler and libraries. According to our sources, it should be the largest and most important intermediate system update ever released by Apple.
- the new Mac Pro will be immediately available after the Keynote, and the hardware specifications should be as follow:
* 8 Core Xeon Penryn for all (3.2GHz for the high-end model)
* new graphic cards should be available, among them the latest Quadro FX from NVidia
* Apple should offer Blu-ray burner as BTO

Apple should also rename DVD Studio Pro, as the January expected update should bring support for playing and burning BD media; the name could be Disk Studio Pro.

Regarding Penryn-based iMac or MacBook Pro, dates of availability remain unclear, if they are announced in January, they should not be immediately available, as the mobile Penryn CPUs should not be officially available priori January 7th.

Last but not least: the last Intel compiler bringing SSE4 support is also compatible with Itanium CPU, which are the high-end Intel server CPUs. According to our sources, Apple might be launching a series of Xserve "Ultra" powered by Itanium 2 in a near future.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by luke55 

Last but not least: the last Intel compiler bringing SSE4 support is also compatible with Itanium CPU, which are the high-end Intel server CPUs. According to our sources, Apple might be launching a series of Xserve "Ultra" powered by Itanium 2 in a near future.

I don't see Apple going for Itanium ever. I'd expect to see Xeon MP long before Itanium, and I don't expect to see Xeon MP in the near future either.

I doubt Apple will pull much out of SSE4 optimizations. It helps with media encoding (~10% for Divx), but little else.

[eggman]

- According to our sources, it should be the largest and most important intermediate system update ever released by Apple.

Wildly unsupported assertion.

- the new Mac Pro will be immediately available after the Keynote,

Reasonable supposition.

and the hardware specifications should be as follow:
* 8 Core Xeon Penryn for all (3.2GHz for the high-end model)

Conventional wisdom.

* new graphic cards should be available, among them the latest Quadro FX from NVidia

No brainer.

* Apple should offer Blu-ray burner as BTO

Wish masquerading as prediction.

[goMac]

The Macrumors forums have two sources both pointing to December 11th for a release date. We'll see.

[ssegaric]

Damn you goMac, you've given been hope again. I was perfectly sullen, and waiting for January, but now I'll be waiting for "nextTuesday" again!

Steve

[goMac]

Originally Posted by ssegaric 

Damn you goMac, you've given been hope again. I was perfectly sullen, and waiting for January, but now I'll be waiting for "nextTuesday" again!

Steve

They have someone who supposedly has a friend in retail who said that new Mac Pros are coming on the 11th. Normally I would ignore that, but they also separately found some tech podcast where one of the hosts or something took a tour of Apple but said she can't talk about what she saw until the 11th. So something is certainly coming the 11th if the podcast is to be believed (even if it's not a Mac Pro). Two separate rumors giving the same date certainly is a good sign.

That said, I'm not holding my breath too much.

[tadd]

Somebody on a tour of Apple is the least likely person to see something secret. I could almost believe a contractor or somebody working for a 3rd party vendor (chip vendor, RAID vendor etc...) screwing up with a tour like that but not Apple.

My wife worked in an Apple store for a couple of years and told me that nobody, but NOBODY at the retail stores will find out about anything new until it is in the store, and then only the manager needs to know until the minute HQ says to break it out. http://forums.macnn.com/images/smilies/argue.gif

[Simon]

Originally Posted by goMac 

The Macrumors forums have two sources both pointing to December 11th for a release date.

The same sources that were certain about Thursdsay, Nov 29?