I was hoping this would start at $4k but I knew it wouldn’t. Now I can safely pick between a Mac mini, iMac, and iMac Pro.
Glad it exists, but it’s for video and developers who compile complex projects multiple times a day.
I just want a Mac that runs silently while under heavy load.
This new Mac Pro is obviously for heavy Chrome users
Not sure who you are referring to, but since you replied to me, I’m confused as well.
I absolutely love the design. Happy to see they’re going modular again. Also kind of disappointed they’re sticking to AMD graphics cards — everything I care about runs exclusively on CUDA. I’d love having one, but it’s overkill for my needs and can’t see myself justifying it in the foreseeable future.
The previous base model(2013) was introduced for 3000 which made it fairly accessible for semi pro users who wanted to do freelance work. 4000 for a bit of extra power would have you set.
I owned a Mac Pro 2008 and loved that machine. I’m very disappointed that this new Mac Pro is out of reach. I usually will defend paying a premium for good stuff, but 999 for a monitor stand is absolutely excessive.
It also seems like it’s really not for the average audio pro or pro photographer. They’ve already pushed a lot of those users away from Macs, but this will make it even worse.
so this is totally out of my wheelhouse, I don’t know much about workstations or the requirements of high end studios. i’ve heard arguments from many that these are actually priced competitively with solutions from PC manufacturers (no idea how true that is) - but supposing an org has the money to actually buy these, you’d think they’d have someone on staff with the knowledge and ability to build and maintain custom workstations in the first place. maybe i’m totally wrong. anyways, I can’t wait to buy an 8 core/16 thread ryzen cpu for 300 bucks in july.
edit: i’ll add in that these products arguably achieved apple’s goal of getting everyone talking about “professionals” and macintosh at a time when pro faith in the brand is at an all-time low.
I saw they also sell some fancy wooden knobs as accessories for the Mac Pro for $399 that add a “structured warmth and organic smoothness to audio applications”.
(full disclosure: no I didn’t)
Interesting distinction between this era and the previous: the old Mac Pros (I had many) were modular, yes, but mostly this was about storage: hard drives and removable media. (The RAM was easily accessible and replaceable, too.) With the “trash can” Mac Pro and this new one, storage is largely exiled from the box. The market assumption is that you’ll roll your own external storage solution that best fits your needs. The only native storage really supported in these newer systems are super high performance SSD-based systems that carry a staggering cost-to-capacity ratio. One could argue that the implicit distinction between short-term, high performance “working storage” and slower “long term storage” from the mainframe era has recently reappeared on the desktop after being mostly invisible during the personal computing era. These new Mac Pros are all about work-specific computational throughput in a larger context: nodes of a greater enterprise infrastructure, rather than self-contained workstations. You can use one of these new Mac Pros as a self-contained workstation, but it’s hard to justify the investment unless your use case really matches up. This machine is totally about video and 3D graphics, and some kinds of photographers are going to jump on these simply because of the vast amount of RAM at their disposal. Audio? Maybe, but you’re probably not going to want to slap an audio interface into the MPX format, so what, exactly, are you paying for here?
The current Mac Mini is arguably the Mac Pro for the rest of us. As with the current Mac Pros, storage is roll-your-own, and it has some limitations that grate. It would be nice to see a new Mac Mini that is more of a scaled down version of the new Mac Pro: a pro machine with fewer RAM and processor limitations, but without a lot of wasted resources on extreme graphics throughput.
Meanwhile, IMO, the iMacs are a pretty great value.
Do you think that Apple will release a high-end monitor for the rest of us too?
I wouldn’t hold my breath. As a business, the Mac Pro (and iMac Pro) are utterly insignificant. Worse, they represent a very expensive resource sap to the company. Apple abandoned the niche “pro market” many years ago, because it’s just not significantly profitable on their scale, it gobbles developer resources, and was frequently in conflict with development in the main consumer business. (Those conflicts culminated in the the Final Cut X launch debacle.) The current Mac Pro and iMac Pro are halo products—their value to Apple is as a way to message everyone that Apple is “on the cutting edge” even if what they really sell is (generally) well-designed consumer electronics.
The Mac Mini has always been the bastard child in the lineup, because it’s a nightmare of a product to market: it’s just a faceless little gray box with a computer inside. Not sexy. From a branding standpoint, it’s a total loser. The latest Mac Mini is at least reasonably high performance—IIRC, it was briefly (arguably) the fastest Mac available. Regardless, it’s a huge change over the previous Mac Minis, which were entry-level only. I suspect this new performance-oriented Mac Mini is viewed as something of an experiment within Apple, and whether we see more like it or not depends on how everything plays out (not just a question of raw sales). The prospects might be improved if Apple themselves are finding the Mac Mini useful and cost-effective for build farms and such.
Sorry! I mis-read “monitor” as “computer”. I’ll be a little surprised to see Apple get seriously back into the standalone display business (like back when they had that range of Cinema Displays) because the market is already swimming with Thunderbolt (or Thunderbolt-adaptable) monitors at myriad price points. But if Apple’s existing display business (mainly for iMac and the laptops) feels it has capacity and a market for standalones and something to add that is good for the brand, then maybe they will try again?
I think the more likely scenario is that the Pro Display XDR was viewed as a necessary interim product to raise the bar, and that it will fade away as the rest of the market catches up.
I mean, have you seen what that thing does to RAM?
I’ll add to @mdoudoroff’s response by saying - why would I want them to? There are lots of great monitor options at all prices, up to and including pro level displays. Other than appearance, and maybe the expansion ports, I don’t know what Apple brings to this.
On the other hand, I continue to buy Apple computers because I still like how they make them and the software that runs on them, neither of which cares what monitor I use.
Ok, if you really want to…
Def - sry, let me substantiate that a bit.
Totally agree with all the above that this is not meant for a ‘consumer’ market, and as such, the pricing should be understood through that lens (it sounds like it’s actually set pretty comparable to PC alternatives at this level).
With that being said, I feel like an ‘aspirational’ machine should still feel like it’s not a giant middle finger from a design standpoint, and selling a monitor without a stand, then charging an ACTUAL GRAND for a monitor stand (or $200 just for the privilege of buying your own 3rd party one), seems like price gauging the top end of your client base because they have no other viable plan or vision for the future of technology beyond luxury ‘pro’ items, and fluff-content devices/subscriptions for the masses.
This article summed some of it up nicely, and I’m especially bummed because I love OSx, and have been inspired by using their tools for many, many years. As a working artist operating between hard line audio work and light 3D/VR work, I feel like I’ve been getting the message loud and clear that Apple both A) doesn’t care about serving our market anymore, and B) Even if they did, they have no vision for how technology will work in the context of cultural production (rather than luxury cultural consumption) post-2015.
Also, the lack of NVIDIA support is beyond frustrating. ‘Pro’ work is more than just hi-def video editing, and a lot of AI research, machine learning, particle simulation, etc seems pretty hardwired into that. It’s rough seeing Apple as anything other than a cynical, price-gouging shadow of its former self, especially when seeing wacky, risk-taking stuff from other camps, like say, a maker-friendly bit of hardware for running machine learning sold for literally a tenth of the price of a GOT DAMN METAL STAND.
Apparently at WWDC they were showing off Mac minis with updated “Pro like” internals (whatever that means)
People have kept saying this but they release huge updates to Logic Pro every year and have bought up audio companies like Camel, which they later then port updated versions of their products into Logic for free.
How is this not support, they obviously dont need the money
I would like to buy a proper portable Mac with a reliable keyboard and non-problematic T2 audio related dropouts. This seems like a good starting point for what I’d like to see re: support.
The keyboard is bad not gonna argue there. I’m sure they’re gonna patch the T2 issues (for the people who have it) but also the T2 chip gives users a lot of security in an increasingly surveilled world