Still don't understand the justification for this machine, I waited years for a MacPro but when it became clear that Apple actually considered it a dead product and behind the scenes were building the iMac Pro to fill the niche I switched to windows and now run a dual 1080Ti workstation (Uses CUDA for 3D rendering path-tracing) for around half the price of a iMac Pro.
Apple bloggers said time and time again the reason they were not making a tower was that there isn't really a market for one anymore, yet when they finally made it they decided to build something that only really serves the highest of high end video editors.
Completely ignoring 3D, mid range video editors, developers who need high core counts + ECC, deep learning, etc.
Before they made it we kept being told "There isn't enough of you to justify them making it"
They finally make it and the narrative turns into "It's not for you it's for people who edit Marvel movies"
I think they should include Apple Care for their professional equipment. This won't put any any more money in Apple's pocket but I could see it being another differentiator and a good bit of PR, especially to all of those price arguments. Plus, it's only $300 and I'm sure Apple could suffer that "loss" on a $6,000 - $30,000 purchase.
A great machine to be sure for high end content creation but Apple is not chasing the deep learning dev market because of the lack of CUDA. That market is better served by Linux boxes with appropriate GPUs for TensorFlow, PyTorch, etc. support.
Slightly off-topic, but who here uses a HEDT (high-end desktop) or workstation computer for software development? Does it make a significant difference in comparison with a standard business laptop?
Yes. I work on a Linux distro, and the amount of time my 1st gen 32 core Threadripper has saved me is truly mind blowing. It made it possible to do changes I wouldn't have dreamed of.
As an example, I worked a bunch on our PostgreSQL infrastructure, but we support 5 years of versions. So you have to CI/integrate your changes and test them across all 5 versions, every time you test. My machine could do this on the order of 2-3 minutes -- recompiling everything from scratch every time, and running all integration tests on all versions. There's no CI system or cost-effective cloud hardware that would have given me turnaround like that. In the end I was doing hundreds of builds over the course of just a few days.
In contrast, at $WORK we have a C codebase that takes < 1 minute to compile on my 4 core work laptop. YMMV.
I use an 8-core iMac Pro with 64GB RAM; it’s wonderful.
When I bought it I was doing some embedded device work involving a Windows VM, as well as heavy web dev on a frontend JS app and a backend app with tons of Chrome tabs open. All these things crave memory, and my 16GB MacBook Pro was swapping itself to death. This was pre-32GB MacBook Pros, so I bit the bullet and couldn’t be happier with the setup. It’s dead silent basically no matter what I do and doesn’t get thermally throttled during heavy workloads. Having the extra RAM also makes a huge difference.
Now that I’m doing more regular web dev on an Elixir & React app, I benefit from the 16x parallel compilation & test suite, as well as the ability to keep basically anything open without resource issues.
I just upgraded from a 2700X to a 3900X. Maybe it’s not quite HEDT but its closer, and my god, it’s literally mind blowing. I measured a 47% wall clock improvement on a test compilation. If you compile lots of C++ you are in for some serious surprises. Especially so if you are doing things that cross-cut hundreds of C++ packages at once, it basically enables things that aren’t possible on, say, a mid range laptop.
That said, if you are just running simple Go or Rust compilations, or small single-package C++ compilations, caching and a decent processor should be good enough, and you probably won’t benefit much from a lot of threads. (You may want it for your Webpack builds still ;)
One tip: scale up your RAM, pay attention to clocks and latency relative to your processor (especially with AMD where it really matters.) 16 GB is easy to kill when you are running 24 instances of GCC and a VM or two.
I don't have an HEDT but an outdated Haswell i5 laptop (not an Ultra Low Voltage model at least, so it's quite fast). Last year I spotted a bug in Firefox and I though it was time to put a line in the contribution section in my resume.
The contribution experience was a nightmare because a full build of Firefox took 3 hrs and running the entire testing framework took 4 hrs, though it turned out that I needed to run only a part of the testing framework. Changing a single line and building it again still took more than 30 minutes.
That was the first moment that I wanted a HEDT in my life. It feels like devs who work with big C++ projects would want a bigger workstation because of the significant build time.
I do, and it makes a significant difference in most of my workloads. A lot of my work requires testing bleeding edge software, for example, applying a small patch to the latest version of kubernetes then running a small virtualized cluster locally to make sure it works.
Even if not for that, I tend to cross compile a lot of software since all the engineers at my company use macs for software development but we deploy to linux servers, so often I end up building rust binaries for linux and it's fairly computationally intense.
For an anecdote, on my work laptop (i9/32Gb/512SSD 2018 15" MBP) I can compile the dev environment from scratch in 40 minutes whereas it takes 4 hours on the company standard dual core/8gb/256gb 2015 13" macbook
I do, although not the kind of software development most people do.
I’m a robotics controls engineer. The code I write is pretty short compared to most of you, and it doesn’t take long to compile. But to test it I have to run very complicated dynamic simulations. These never run in realtime. It’s not uncommon for a thirty-second simulation to take five, ten, fifteen minutes to run; sometimes I have to run many iterations of the sam sim to collect valid statistics. So both CPU speed and number of cores translates directly to time spent waiting for the sim run to finish.
I have a 2013 trashcan Mac Pro with 12 cores. It’s still a good machine.
Oh yes, it makes a _huge_ difference. Most modern laptops use constrained, low power CPUs and GPUs. They are dog slow. Even my 5 year old desktop is substantially faster (like, builds take half the time kind of difference) compared to my <1 year old max spec'd thinkpad.
Possibly the only laptops that could compare to desktops are gaming laptops, and I know developers who buy things like the Razer gaming laptop to try and get desktop-like performance.
I migrated from a MBP to a 2018 Mac mini with 64GB, and the ability to run say 10 VMs at once, without having to limit them to half a GB RAM each is amazing.
I'm not in the market when this thing (Mac Pro) is actually released but in a year or to, I may well be migrating to the latest of the Pro line - I don't care about GPU (much - it just needs to drive some displays) but I do care about CPU speed + core count, Memory and fast storage.
I do, I really like it. Current uptime, ~90 days, got everything the way I like it with i3... I can have hundreds of tabs open in various browsers, I've got 9 workspaces with various projects and things in them and a 4k display.
Actually my main rig is the last mac pro, the 2013 one - I just don't use apple's OS. I really like the rig and I expect to use it until at least 2023 (10 years of use).
I use a dual 10C Xeon (40 threads) with 128gb of RAM as my work desktop. I do builds development for C++, Java, SystemVerilog, and Python codebases. Jetbrains IDE products like IntelliJ, PyCharm, and CLion can use extra cores and ram for indexing our large codebases. The high core count is also useful when compiling C++ from scratch (common for me because I'm often doing weird things that defeat the bazel caches) and running large test suites or medium simulations.
The latest MacBook pros (8 core, 16 threads, 32gb ram, 2tb flash disk) are finally fast enough with enough ram to both run CLion with clangd indexing and do C++ compilation/testing. Full builds are still not advisable (not that a full build is particularly useful since our prod is only Linux and we have CI/desktops to avoid cross-compilation).
I use a desktop, not sure I would call it high end (32 GiB, 6 cores, nvme). I do lots of large builds of things like linux kernels. I doubt any laptop would be able to keep up simply due to thermals.
My company provides a pretty standard laptop, but they rarely have more than 2 cores.
In native app development, Android Studio and Xcode are severely bottlenecked by 2 cores. The difference between my laptop and my Mac Mini (6 cores) is astounding.
The difference between a build taking 6x minutes and 1x minutes is more than just 1/6 because it goes from "Well, guess I'll check email/messenger/HN real quick." to taking a sip of coffee.
It also gets real bad when your IDE is forced to fight with your browser, email client, etc. Then you're forced to do nothing, lest your casual actions further slow down your local build.
Usually the "breaking point" is when builds take more than 5 minutes, but especially when they take more 30+ mins.
I bought a used Dell workstation with a 8c16t Xeon E5-2670 and 32GB ECC DDR3 RAM a few years ago. It's a bit outdated now, but it's still faster than the most laptops (for multi core workloads). At the time I had a MacBook Air, so this completely blew it out the water. I remember one time while trying to debug an issue I had 10 docker instances of our CI running (Rails + Cucumber + Firefox) and there was absolutely no performance impact to the desktop experience.
Last year I bought a T470s with 20GB DDR4 and an i7 (U series) as I was mostly working away from home. It's good enough for most of the work I do, but it can be a bit slow at times. The processor just isn't as fast and the integrated graphics struggle with a 4K desktop (I think that's mainly Linux/GNOME being unoptimised though). I haven't noticed it throttling, but my workload usually isn't that CPU intensive.
If you mainly work from home I'd definately suggest building a desktop machine for your needs.
To add to the chorus, Threadripper has been incredible for deep learning related workloads, partly for the high core count for prepping batches, but also because it can support multiple GPUs and gobs of RAM. If you have a lot of big compile jobs, it shines there too.
Not a desktop, but... My employer typically gives people a MacBook Pro, but when a colleague left a couple of months ago I snarfed his laptop - a ThinkPad with 24GB RAM and an i7. I put Slackware on it (for I am Old Skool) and it's really handling many many tabs, plus our many-docker local dev environment far better than everyone else's Mac.
Of course, it's far bigger and heavier than the Mac, but also of course (for I am Old Skool) I'm using it with a decent keyboard, a decent-sized monitor, a decent mouse, and a USB-C charger. It does mean I can't go to meetings, but that's ok with me...
Does wanting to count? I don't have a need right now, but some years ago I was doing iOS development; compile times started to get to a point where a more powerful system would've come in handy.
Mind you, my workflow could probably do with adjusting as well, I tended to work like I do with webapps and just continually rebuild/restart and review my changes on the device itself (or an emulator).
Part of me also wishes we had a big setup with multiple docker images running in parallel but ATM we have the luxury of working on 'just' a website (react, some lambdas, back-end are all third party services, we connect to a staging environment during development) so it's not too bad.
But I'd still like a permanent machine, there's something about (and this is me idealizing) having a fixed workspace you don't have to pack up every day. I mean sure disconnecting a laptop and yeeting it into a backpack isn't that much effort but it's the little things.
Yes. I have a company issued 2018 MBP 2.6 GHz i7 & 16GB RAM but I prefer to do most of the dev work on my HEDT running Linux (Ubuntu 16.04), 4.0 GHz i7 & 32GB RAM.
It's way better at running Docker instances, a bunch of electron apps, and tons of Chrome tabs simultaneously without a hitch.
I do all my work on desktop workstations; I have a little burner laptop I lug around to meetings, but all it really does is browsing and outlook.
Having a real keyboard, mouse, and four 27" monitors is something I will never leave behind at this point. All that screen real estate to spread out over helps enormously. I can have a browser with our application pulled up, Visual Studio, another browser with doc, Webstorm with the front-end code, SSMS connected to the database, an email client, Notepad++ with logfiles, all the different chat clients I have to use, and more if I really need to, all on screen and available at the same time. I don't have to alt-tab around, I just look and it's there.
I do, but mostly because there's a few projects where running multiple virtual machines with multiple cores and lots of ram is useful for them. Also because I run a VM for cad work for my 3d printer, on the same machine.
My HEDT at home serves as my VR development machine and doubles as a gaming rig. I generally save basic research, design, and sandboxed coding for my MacBook Pro at a coffee shop.
If I had a similar performing laptop that could replace my desktop in terms of GPU performance and compatibility with the devices I use, my HEDT would start collecting dust.
Not a HEDT here, just a regular desktop, but it is significantly more responsive than a business laptop. Also much cheaper than a laptop comparable in performance. Plus it's upgradeable so more future-proof.
I still have an old laptop that I use to ssh into my workstation occasionally.
People here seem to think this is just a random set of components not as good as X+Y+Z. This machine was designed and specced based on talking with the people who will be buying them, not the general public. Complaining its not X+Y+Z is like saying IBM didn't design a mainframe for your needs. Not everything has to build for everyone.
330 Comments, No one asked why was this submitted.
We have discussions on HN [1] when it was announced. The Tech Spec page has been there since day 1, I looked hard and dont see any significant changes, if any changes at all.
The starting 256 GB SSD sticks out like a sore thumb on a machine as expensive as this. The barebones Mac Mini comes with 128 GB and 6-core Mini with 256 GB. And upgrading it is gonna cost an arm and a leg.
Depends entirely on workflow. A lot of shops will have all of their stuff on a 10G NAS share, so you’re actually forbidden from copying to and from your computer because it’s just stupid and sometimes slower to do so.
It is still not shipping so there's not really a reason not to use a Threadripper for lower price AND higher performance. Or even Epyc chips. We know the Titan Ridge Thunderbolt controllers work on AMD motherboards. Alpine Ridge had firmware problems but Titan Ridge is fine.
I wish I could afford these, but I’m really curious to test a hackintosh with threadreaper 3 following what they did on Linus tech tips with a virtualized PC and Mac running at the same time on the same monitor https://youtu.be/EozeSDeV3Vo
I'm bummed out that there's no sign of Navi cards as an option. The 5700 series seems right at home in this machine.
I'm still holding out for a Navi product from Apple. There's some mention of support in the Kexts but alas my 5700 XT does not work in Mojave or Catalina (Hackintosh).
Why do the different processor quantities have different base frequencies (higher for lower CPU count) but the same "Turbo Boost" frequency of 4.4 GHz?
If you ran Folding@Home on one of these, would you get sustained 4.4GHz clock speeds?
Surprised no one(?) commented on the case yet - looks like they came to their senses and went back to the "old" case design.
I've been seriously considering a second-hand, early Mac pro - just for the case. Not sure if they fit regular/modern psus - but those cases were very nice.
Good riddance to the trash can design...
Now, if these wouldn't be priced like a car, and came with some proper AMD cpus ...
[+] [-] whywhywhywhy|6 years ago|reply
Apple bloggers said time and time again the reason they were not making a tower was that there isn't really a market for one anymore, yet when they finally made it they decided to build something that only really serves the highest of high end video editors.
Completely ignoring 3D, mid range video editors, developers who need high core counts + ECC, deep learning, etc.
Before they made it we kept being told "There isn't enough of you to justify them making it"
They finally make it and the narrative turns into "It's not for you it's for people who edit Marvel movies"
[+] [-] Corrado|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lliamander|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aseipp|6 years ago|reply
As an example, I worked a bunch on our PostgreSQL infrastructure, but we support 5 years of versions. So you have to CI/integrate your changes and test them across all 5 versions, every time you test. My machine could do this on the order of 2-3 minutes -- recompiling everything from scratch every time, and running all integration tests on all versions. There's no CI system or cost-effective cloud hardware that would have given me turnaround like that. In the end I was doing hundreds of builds over the course of just a few days.
In contrast, at $WORK we have a C codebase that takes < 1 minute to compile on my 4 core work laptop. YMMV.
[+] [-] bgentry|6 years ago|reply
When I bought it I was doing some embedded device work involving a Windows VM, as well as heavy web dev on a frontend JS app and a backend app with tons of Chrome tabs open. All these things crave memory, and my 16GB MacBook Pro was swapping itself to death. This was pre-32GB MacBook Pros, so I bit the bullet and couldn’t be happier with the setup. It’s dead silent basically no matter what I do and doesn’t get thermally throttled during heavy workloads. Having the extra RAM also makes a huge difference.
Now that I’m doing more regular web dev on an Elixir & React app, I benefit from the 16x parallel compilation & test suite, as well as the ability to keep basically anything open without resource issues.
[+] [-] jchw|6 years ago|reply
That said, if you are just running simple Go or Rust compilations, or small single-package C++ compilations, caching and a decent processor should be good enough, and you probably won’t benefit much from a lot of threads. (You may want it for your Webpack builds still ;)
One tip: scale up your RAM, pay attention to clocks and latency relative to your processor (especially with AMD where it really matters.) 16 GB is easy to kill when you are running 24 instances of GCC and a VM or two.
[+] [-] kbumsik|6 years ago|reply
The contribution experience was a nightmare because a full build of Firefox took 3 hrs and running the entire testing framework took 4 hrs, though it turned out that I needed to run only a part of the testing framework. Changing a single line and building it again still took more than 30 minutes.
That was the first moment that I wanted a HEDT in my life. It feels like devs who work with big C++ projects would want a bigger workstation because of the significant build time.
[+] [-] edude03|6 years ago|reply
Even if not for that, I tend to cross compile a lot of software since all the engineers at my company use macs for software development but we deploy to linux servers, so often I end up building rust binaries for linux and it's fairly computationally intense.
For an anecdote, on my work laptop (i9/32Gb/512SSD 2018 15" MBP) I can compile the dev environment from scratch in 40 minutes whereas it takes 4 hours on the company standard dual core/8gb/256gb 2015 13" macbook
[+] [-] GlenTheMachine|6 years ago|reply
I’m a robotics controls engineer. The code I write is pretty short compared to most of you, and it doesn’t take long to compile. But to test it I have to run very complicated dynamic simulations. These never run in realtime. It’s not uncommon for a thirty-second simulation to take five, ten, fifteen minutes to run; sometimes I have to run many iterations of the sam sim to collect valid statistics. So both CPU speed and number of cores translates directly to time spent waiting for the sim run to finish.
I have a 2013 trashcan Mac Pro with 12 cores. It’s still a good machine.
[+] [-] nvarsj|6 years ago|reply
Possibly the only laptops that could compare to desktops are gaming laptops, and I know developers who buy things like the Razer gaming laptop to try and get desktop-like performance.
[+] [-] stephenr|6 years ago|reply
I migrated from a MBP to a 2018 Mac mini with 64GB, and the ability to run say 10 VMs at once, without having to limit them to half a GB RAM each is amazing.
I'm not in the market when this thing (Mac Pro) is actually released but in a year or to, I may well be migrating to the latest of the Pro line - I don't care about GPU (much - it just needs to drive some displays) but I do care about CPU speed + core count, Memory and fast storage.
[+] [-] newman8r|6 years ago|reply
Actually my main rig is the last mac pro, the 2013 one - I just don't use apple's OS. I really like the rig and I expect to use it until at least 2023 (10 years of use).
[+] [-] emidln|6 years ago|reply
The latest MacBook pros (8 core, 16 threads, 32gb ram, 2tb flash disk) are finally fast enough with enough ram to both run CLion with clangd indexing and do C++ compilation/testing. Full builds are still not advisable (not that a full build is particularly useful since our prod is only Linux and we have CI/desktops to avoid cross-compilation).
[+] [-] Skunkleton|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] valbaca|6 years ago|reply
In native app development, Android Studio and Xcode are severely bottlenecked by 2 cores. The difference between my laptop and my Mac Mini (6 cores) is astounding.
The difference between a build taking 6x minutes and 1x minutes is more than just 1/6 because it goes from "Well, guess I'll check email/messenger/HN real quick." to taking a sip of coffee.
It also gets real bad when your IDE is forced to fight with your browser, email client, etc. Then you're forced to do nothing, lest your casual actions further slow down your local build.
Usually the "breaking point" is when builds take more than 5 minutes, but especially when they take more 30+ mins.
[+] [-] deminature|6 years ago|reply
Cumulative wasted minutes from compilation over the course of a year can add up to a lot.
[+] [-] loeg|6 years ago|reply
It's absolutely faster than any business laptop for doing builds of medium sized C and C++ projects.
(But I think a non-HEDT desktop would also outperform a typical laptop in this use case -- thermal throttling is a real problem for laptops.)
[+] [-] fyfy18|6 years ago|reply
Last year I bought a T470s with 20GB DDR4 and an i7 (U series) as I was mostly working away from home. It's good enough for most of the work I do, but it can be a bit slow at times. The processor just isn't as fast and the integrated graphics struggle with a 4K desktop (I think that's mainly Linux/GNOME being unoptimised though). I haven't noticed it throttling, but my workload usually isn't that CPU intensive.
If you mainly work from home I'd definately suggest building a desktop machine for your needs.
[+] [-] ericd|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vmlinuz|6 years ago|reply
Of course, it's far bigger and heavier than the Mac, but also of course (for I am Old Skool) I'm using it with a decent keyboard, a decent-sized monitor, a decent mouse, and a USB-C charger. It does mean I can't go to meetings, but that's ok with me...
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|6 years ago|reply
Mind you, my workflow could probably do with adjusting as well, I tended to work like I do with webapps and just continually rebuild/restart and review my changes on the device itself (or an emulator).
Part of me also wishes we had a big setup with multiple docker images running in parallel but ATM we have the luxury of working on 'just' a website (react, some lambdas, back-end are all third party services, we connect to a staging environment during development) so it's not too bad.
But I'd still like a permanent machine, there's something about (and this is me idealizing) having a fixed workspace you don't have to pack up every day. I mean sure disconnecting a laptop and yeeting it into a backpack isn't that much effort but it's the little things.
[+] [-] timwaagh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jesalg|6 years ago|reply
It's way better at running Docker instances, a bunch of electron apps, and tons of Chrome tabs simultaneously without a hitch.
[+] [-] thrower123|6 years ago|reply
Having a real keyboard, mouse, and four 27" monitors is something I will never leave behind at this point. All that screen real estate to spread out over helps enormously. I can have a browser with our application pulled up, Visual Studio, another browser with doc, Webstorm with the front-end code, SSMS connected to the database, an email client, Notepad++ with logfiles, all the different chat clients I have to use, and more if I really need to, all on screen and available at the same time. I don't have to alt-tab around, I just look and it's there.
[+] [-] NCG_Mike|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsalso|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simcop2387|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baroffoos|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tlobes|6 years ago|reply
If I had a similar performing laptop that could replace my desktop in terms of GPU performance and compatibility with the devices I use, my HEDT would start collecting dust.
[+] [-] rehemiau|6 years ago|reply
I still have an old laptop that I use to ssh into my workstation occasionally.
[+] [-] coldcode|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksec|6 years ago|reply
We have discussions on HN [1] when it was announced. The Tech Spec page has been there since day 1, I looked hard and dont see any significant changes, if any changes at all.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20087315
[+] [-] lm28469|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hamuko|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sudhirj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whywhywhywhy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peignoir|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bfrog|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hinkley|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m0zg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dev_dull|6 years ago|reply
Surprised there's no 802.11ax/wifi 6. Why not use the same wifi chips as the iPhones?
[+] [-] cgb223|6 years ago|reply
That’s wild
What’s the professional use case for that?
[+] [-] jagger27|6 years ago|reply
I'm still holding out for a Navi product from Apple. There's some mention of support in the Kexts but alas my 5700 XT does not work in Mojave or Catalina (Hackintosh).
[+] [-] joncrane|6 years ago|reply
If you ran Folding@Home on one of these, would you get sustained 4.4GHz clock speeds?
[+] [-] initself|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperactive|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e12e|6 years ago|reply
I've been seriously considering a second-hand, early Mac pro - just for the case. Not sure if they fit regular/modern psus - but those cases were very nice.
Good riddance to the trash can design...
Now, if these wouldn't be priced like a car, and came with some proper AMD cpus ...
[+] [-] kristianp|6 years ago|reply