Looking at it from a purely financial perspective, the Mac Pro line is not a major player in their financial statement, and they could easily delete it from their line of products, and barely notice a difference (financially).
One could claim that about the Mac Mini, or the iPod Classic, or even the Mac keyboards or Mac-branded software, but the claim would be just as wrong.
I don't think that Apple has made up it's mind what it wants to do with the line and doesn't seem to be in any hurry to do so. As didlloyd "macintosh performance" said .
Diglloyd also said that new Mac Pros were 'definitely' around the corner... in March. In other words he's just guessing, and has no idea.
I think it's telling how we haven't heard a peep from Dell, HP, etc. regarding their Xeon E5 workstations... Intel is pulling a "Motorola G5" on everyone...
As to the future of the Mac Pro as a product, this guy sums it up best (why Thunderbolt is NOT the answer)
I have a strong feeling that it's sadly EOL for the Mac Pro, and we won't see a new Gen. of Mac Pro's in 2012. But then again, nothing is preventing Apple from releasing new iMac Pro line, maybe later this.
I guess we will find out when Apple officially announces something.
I would hate to be without my MacPro. The internal drive bays, PCIe, and ports galore. I'm tied pretty tight into OSX, so if the MacPro goes away, I really hope there's a comparable replacement. iMac Pro, or something new.
Yup it's a six month old Mac rumor, and still holding its ground heh
No, it was just you posting an old link to one rumor website which simply linked to another rumor website that speculated without any evidence or leak whatsoever.
All during a period in which no new server chips were out from Intel so no new Mac Pros were likely anyway.
Does it matter? The $1k DIY Sandybridge box killed the Mac Pro for audio work and if you had to have a Mac OS no matter what then for a couple hundred dollars more that same Sandybridge box with a Hackintosh configuration killed that need. Those arguing that 32 gb of ram won't cut it for their needs would only have to set up a farm of Sandybridge boxes which would out perform ANY new Mac Pro for less money. Frankly the existing Mac Pros and any new Xeon based Mac Pro is at best a "kit car with Chevy parts in a fancy case" if you need to make anologies. There is just too much marketing crap going on around here. If you need to belong to a super exclusive audio club mail me the base membership fee of $10k to recieve your Super Exclusive membership stuff. I guarantee there will be less members, MORE exclusivity, and the hardware will beat anything offered by the the Mac Pro club! So for those members not involved in marketing Apple it just doesn't matter if they release a new Mac Pro.
hm, i absolutely agree with your last sentence. but the rest of it makes me think that you probably have not used a mac on a regular basis. I come from a life long pc use, had to start with mac because of the hated logic, once i got around it, i forgot all about it. why? because in 2 years of heavy use and abuse of my mbp unibody, i had to reformat the hhd once. in the same time on my pc i was doing this about every 3 months or so. now, for about half a year, i changed my last pc to mac pro in the studio.. some of my projects are quite big. I had zero problems, not once did i have to repair anything, no hdd reformat, adding memory was a breeze.... i hope i never have to go pack to ****ty pc use... they dont only look crap but they are crap compared to any mac - and for me that starts directly with the OS. my wife and my daughter have pcs with W7- 64, one pc 4gb dual channel ram and the other 8gb dual channel. 1gb graphics, 64bit processors x2.... the speed is there, but the use is just horrible. i cannot understand that any professional would work on a pc in this business.
just my opinion. and back to the thread, i think apple will EOL the mac pro. not that i care, and if they close down tomorrow, i couldnt care less as long as my local baker keeps on making that fantastic wood oven style bread... i just love this bread....
No, it was just you posting an old link to one rumor website which simply linked to another rumor website that speculated without any evidence or leak whatsoever.
All during a period in which no new server chips were out from Intel so no new Mac Pros were likely anyway.
Yes, that's correct. and all we have to go by at this point are rumors. Since Apple is not going to announce anything until they either have the next gen. Mac Pros to ship, or say nothing if they have decided it's EOL for Mac Pro.
As far as the server chips not being out, I am aware of that, but that still does not give us a clue to figure out if they have or have not killed the Mac Pro. It's Apple's Secrecy policy that has created all this uncertainty, and many of us using their PRO-Products, are hanging in mid air, not sure where we are going to land.
On a positive note.. As the saying goes 'No News, is Good News' so maybe they will announce the next Mac Pro in the near future, now that those new Intel-Chips are beginning to ship, but... I won't count on it. (I would love to be wrong here), since I'm a Mac Pro user, and have been for quite some time.
Again HP isn't shipping E5 Xeons in volume, nor is Dell, nor is anyone...so speculate all you want but Apple isn't the only bottleneck here. And yes this post is as redundant as all the 'cancellers' are...
I think it's telling how we haven't heard a peep from Dell, HP, etc. regarding their Xeon E5 workstations... Intel is pulling a "Motorola G5" on everyone...
As to the future of the Mac Pro as a product, this guy sums it up best (why Thunderbolt is NOT the answer)
The only thing I'd add is that I don't think Intel is exactly pulling a "Motorola" move here...
Initially tere was a confirmed bug with the controller chipset's (C600) SAS support and then it leaked that the chips themselves had a bug in the virtualization hooks. So not only was the chipset lineup not ready across the board for the motherboards, but the chips themselves were unsuitable for server deployment & workstations where virtualization was going to be heavily utilized. So October of last year came & went and Intel announced 'at least a 1 quarter delay' in E5 Xeons...
And then after that AMD had an extremely lackluster launch of their own, with abysmal floating point performance (to which AMD enthusiasts reply "think of the octo cores as just being Intel quads with HT due to the shared FP units--when Intel has hexacores and upcoming octos *with* HT to boot).
In other words where Motorola clearly had issues prioritizing desktop & mobile PowerPC development and seemed to prefer to focus on embedded/mobile tech, Intel seems to be using a handful of issues that were solved before the Winter was even over to their own convience. What I mean is that Intel found themselves in a situation where they already faced delays and wound up facing no competition to their current Westmere lineup anyway. So why not just go through your core stepping & chipset debugging, build up stock and push the entire roadmap for server/workstations back while you're at it.
Taking the long view, any delay in current roadmaps when competition is light allows Intel to delay the inevitable approach of 3nm (electron leakage issues). Plus the landscape of server sales has shifted in the last few years anyway, so by delaying deployment of a new tech Intel actually increases the chances that large hosting facilites (cloud hosting, Facebook, Google etc) will do massive orders to deploy new tech if the next gen falls later than usual...you can google analysts who have discussed this to death and refer to it as 'lumpiness' in the way sales work for that market these days.
So in short, while Mac Pros may be a minor blip in Apple's sales, you can be sure that in Intel's sales figures they barely even register. And that particular point I would concur is in line with the Motorola comparison...
i want my MiniPro ... smaller rack mountable size case ala G4 / will hold 2 Sata drives and 4 SSD drives (2 internal and 2 slots for removability) / FW800 / USB 3.0 / 3 PCIe / and Thunderbolt / high end video card with HDMI broadcast output / slim optical drive / and it will do windows (not windows 7, the ones that let light in ) ...
i hope there is one more ... i feel my 8-core has been great but i would love to get up to the next level before i am through ... it runs really well in 64bit kernal ...
Update
I normally also check AppleHDA.kext for new audio layout files. And this time was no exception...
Now look at the technical specifications of the current Mac models and think for a moment. Like what models don’t have a microphone? Mac Pro and Macmini perhaps? Well. I’ll let your imagination do the rest, but I see a whole lot of new hardware in it.
i want my MiniPro ... smaller rack mountable size case ala G4 / will hold 2 Sata drives and 4 SSD drives (2 internal and 2 slots for removability) / FW800 / USB 3.0 / 3 PCIe / and Thunderbolt / high end video card with HDMI broadcast output / slim optical drive / and it will do windows (not windows 7, the ones that let light in ) ...
i hope there is one more ... i feel my 8-core has been great but i would love to get up to the next level before i am through ... it runs really well in 64bit kernal ...
cheers
john
It was called Xserve, and they discontinued them along with the Xserve RAID.
Ivy bridge is shipping in volume, E5 Xeons still aren't. Would be happy if they were though, the prices atm for bare cpu's are just astronomical compared to the last 5 years worth of Xeon chips. Hopefully when the prices stabilize we'll see Mac Pros too....