The new Mac Pro forces all device makers to use interfaces that are compatible with the entire range of Apple hardware.
There's no "oh, we only have a card, you have to have a machine with slots" anymore - every machine, from the lowliest Mac Minis and MacBooks to the highest end Mac Pro will be able to use the same peripherals.
I think this is the end goal. Apple's computers will scale along the CPU and GPU performance and memory size axes, with everything else being an peripheral you can theoretically move to any computer you own.
One of the most nerve-wracking moments of my (former) life as a recording engineer was installing a brand new Pro Tools card into a brand new Mac Pro at Aereosmith's studio. For whatever reason, the fit was way tighter than normal and I literally had to put some of my body weight over the thing to get it to slide in. All the while, just wondering how I was going to explain to Joe Perry that I had snapped a $6k Pro Tools card in half. Luckily, I didn't have to.
The scaling across the range would be much smoother if they released a headless mid-range machine, rather than relying entirely on iMacs (and laptops) to fill the gap between the Mini and the Pro. They seem quite actively disinterested in building such a machine, though.
This has always been their plan. They tried this with the original Macintosh and it's successors. Up until now the PC market was growing too fast for them to get away with it. Now with the "Post-PC era" they're giving it another shot. I think it's an interesting idea, each external peripheral does one thing well. It reflects their current advertising and their product lines.
This is one thing I never really understood. Apple really cares a lot about aesthetics. In the store their devices all look fantastic standing alone surrounded by white/black.
But when you see an Apple device in the real world, it looks like crap. Why? Because it's tangled up in this octopus of cables and external doodads.
In my office I have a Lenovo X220, and everyone else has Macs, mostly Macbooks. I have a docking station, so all my cables other than mouse and keyboard are behind my desk out of sight and mind. The co-worker with the iMac has the same situation. Everyone else has a Macbook Pro or Air. The entire left sides of their desk are a mess of cables spewing out the side of the Macbooks. It ruins everything.
Hiding everything inside of the beautiful box keeps it pretty, so I've never really understood why Apple loves external devices so much more than internal.
I think that's a problem that's rather unique to our field. Most people I know who have MacBooks don't have them in a "docked" configuration ever. It sits on their desk where the most that comes out of them is the power adapter and a USB cable.
I hear ya though, my Macbook Pro doubles as my home development machine, so when I'm "docked" it's just a morass of cables. It really would be nice if Apple lived up to the "Pro" moniker and gave us a reasonable dock.
I did order a Henge dock a while back, maybe I should actually unpack it and set it up...
They want you to buy their Thunderbolt display as a dock. You connect two cables - power and Thunderbolt to computer, and everything else to the display. It has few usb, firewire, ehternet, audio (built-in speakers), camera...
I agree, I use my rMBP connected to a second monitor, network cable and with an external keyboard and mouse, so I have cables and adapters vomiting all over my desk. When I come in to work in the morning I spend a good few minutes connecting all that crap up and sorting the cables out so I have some space to work.
The endless adapters definitely add more clutter and complexity to the setup.
With my old Dell I just plopped it into the dock which kept most of that stuff sorted out and pointed away from my desk. I had the same amount of connectors, just organized better.
I recently moved to a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and finally got my wifi setup so now it's just power and monitor and it looks much more sane.
Of course now I have to make sure my mouse and keyboard are turned on and wait for them to connect which means I'm sometimes logging into my computer from it's own keyboard first to fiddle with the bluetooth stuff.
I'm considering getting an external optical drive which of course will reverse this trend, but for now I can't burn any disks when I need to.
> Hiding everything inside of the beautiful box keeps it pretty, so I've never really understood why Apple loves external devices so much more than internal.
If you mean this criticism in regards to the Mac Pro, expansion cards usually have cables coming out of them as well, so the Mac Pro is no different from traditional desktops in that regard. SSD on PCI is obviously an exception here, but that's a relative newcomer.
As far as laptop computers, the reason you have a dock and others don't is that you purchased a dock, and the others didn't. So perhaps the Apple users you know care less about aesthetics than you think they do.
The author hits the nail right on the head here. The new Mac Pro is making a bold bet on the future: that given sufficient bandwidth, the benefits of external expansion ultimately outweigh the benefits of packing them into a tower. This is going to cause tremendous short-term pain and the fiercest hand-wringing the tech world has seen since the release of FCP X, but in the long term I think Apple made the right bet and will come out ahead.
Let's not forget that moving to thunderbolt actually makes the whole machine MORE expandable, because of daisy-chaining.
An existing computer may have something like 5 PCIe slots. That's your limit. But with these thunderbolt ports, you can hook up 6 devices per port. 5 PCIe cards vs a potential of 36? I really don't see how the new Mac Pro is less extendable.
In addition, now that there is no CD Drive, there's no longer any reason why this tower needs to sit where you do. You could theoretically have 40ft Thunderbolt cables drive your displays, and the computer can be neatly stowed away in another room, and just the interfaces (like these cool looking RME devices) and other monitors and editing equipment can stay on your desk.
When it comes time to upgrade, you just replace the "brain", and hook up all the cables to it.
I am not a AV guy, but using my mac mini i started to do the same thing described in the article. rather than byuing an internal hdd, i simply connected a 1tb external drive (silent, sdd). at first I didn't think about it, but this enabled me to:
- Need to transfer files to one of my Windows machines? Simply unplug the hdd from the mac and plug into the Winbox
- Travelling? Take my entire library of stuff with me. No need for DropBox, etc. This works offline, anywhere.
Sounds low tech and slightly too simple, but I'd love to expand this to other functionalities. An external graphics card would be awesome, play games on any machine I want (Mini or Air...).
I've built my own gaming PCs, but by now I would really prefer something more modular, easy, true plug and play.
It's not an either/or proposition; Why couldn't Apple have provided a tower that had both internal and external expansion? Because new Mac Pro 'needs' to be 1/8th the volume of the old Mac Pro?
As a side point, those RME audio interfaces mentioned in the article are utterly fantastic. I've recently acquired an older firewire one, and it makes everything else in its pricerange look like a bad joke.
They are the only people developing custom USB/firewire controllers, everyone else just sticks a TI chipset in there, wraps the OEM drivers and goes to lunch. Not the plucky germans at RME.
If you need to get audio in or out of your computer, you should settle for nothing less.
This really reminds me of the original iMac. When it came out, USB devices were pretty rare, but this got better pretty quickly, especially regarding printers. Firewire wasn't as successful. Although, if I understand correctly, you can just hook up an external PCI-express bay via thunderbolt, so you don't really need special hardware (like e.g. USB audio devices). So apart from the usual series of external hard drives, you'll probably find a few expansion bays docket to your central ash tray.
But given the additional power bricks, wires and boxes you need for this, it seems they're optimizing for the non-extended situation and/or want to give their other computers equal footing.
I think the key point brought up here is that there is greater convenience in external accessories once there is more than one computing device to use them with - and I'd say that's a much more common scenario than it used to be.
My suggestion to Apple (or 3PP), would be to make a stackable accessory form factor (along the lines of http://www.123macmini.com/accessories/guide/enclosures.html) with built-in Thunderbolt connectors, or at least cable guides. They could be styled in the same style as the Mac Pro. Imagine just slotting on another level of your little accessory tower, with a single Thunderbolt going to the "capital ship".
The loss of the hard drive bays really doesn't worry me (is anyone doing serious work really not working off a big RAID or a SAN?), and my audio interfaces have been external for years...
The only thing I might want is a PCI-Express slot for a RED ROCKET card (it's a hardware decoder for 4K+ video from RED cameras) but I've never really felt the urge to splurge for one of those - both Final Cut Pro X and Premiere Pro are good enough at decoding it with the CPU and GPU even on my MacBook Pro so the Mac Pro should have no problems with it... The only time I feel it is rendering (you can work in 1/4 res [a bit more than 1080p] but for finishing you want full quality even if you're downscaling). And if I did want one, there are a number of adaptors that work with them...
Audio pros want everything outside the box anyway: interference from the power supply, motherboard, etc are unacceptable. External peripherals are the norm.
[+] [-] zdw|12 years ago|reply
There's no "oh, we only have a card, you have to have a machine with slots" anymore - every machine, from the lowliest Mac Minis and MacBooks to the highest end Mac Pro will be able to use the same peripherals.
I think this is the end goal. Apple's computers will scale along the CPU and GPU performance and memory size axes, with everything else being an peripheral you can theoretically move to any computer you own.
It's a bold move.
[+] [-] kevincennis|12 years ago|reply
One of the most nerve-wracking moments of my (former) life as a recording engineer was installing a brand new Pro Tools card into a brand new Mac Pro at Aereosmith's studio. For whatever reason, the fit was way tighter than normal and I literally had to put some of my body weight over the thing to get it to slide in. All the while, just wondering how I was going to explain to Joe Perry that I had snapped a $6k Pro Tools card in half. Luckily, I didn't have to.
[+] [-] masklinn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dasmoth|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cwisecarver|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiggy2011|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Southamptondave|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _pmf_|12 years ago|reply
No. It's "letting people use their device in a non-retarded way".
[+] [-] Apreche|12 years ago|reply
But when you see an Apple device in the real world, it looks like crap. Why? Because it's tangled up in this octopus of cables and external doodads.
In my office I have a Lenovo X220, and everyone else has Macs, mostly Macbooks. I have a docking station, so all my cables other than mouse and keyboard are behind my desk out of sight and mind. The co-worker with the iMac has the same situation. Everyone else has a Macbook Pro or Air. The entire left sides of their desk are a mess of cables spewing out the side of the Macbooks. It ruins everything.
Hiding everything inside of the beautiful box keeps it pretty, so I've never really understood why Apple loves external devices so much more than internal.
[+] [-] potatolicious|12 years ago|reply
I hear ya though, my Macbook Pro doubles as my home development machine, so when I'm "docked" it's just a morass of cables. It really would be nice if Apple lived up to the "Pro" moniker and gave us a reasonable dock.
I did order a Henge dock a while back, maybe I should actually unpack it and set it up...
[+] [-] klausa|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bane|12 years ago|reply
The endless adapters definitely add more clutter and complexity to the setup.
With my old Dell I just plopped it into the dock which kept most of that stuff sorted out and pointed away from my desk. I had the same amount of connectors, just organized better.
I recently moved to a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and finally got my wifi setup so now it's just power and monitor and it looks much more sane.
Of course now I have to make sure my mouse and keyboard are turned on and wait for them to connect which means I'm sometimes logging into my computer from it's own keyboard first to fiddle with the bluetooth stuff.
I'm considering getting an external optical drive which of course will reverse this trend, but for now I can't burn any disks when I need to.
[+] [-] epistasis|12 years ago|reply
If you mean this criticism in regards to the Mac Pro, expansion cards usually have cables coming out of them as well, so the Mac Pro is no different from traditional desktops in that regard. SSD on PCI is obviously an exception here, but that's a relative newcomer.
As far as laptop computers, the reason you have a dock and others don't is that you purchased a dock, and the others didn't. So perhaps the Apple users you know care less about aesthetics than you think they do.
[+] [-] dasil003|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atonse|12 years ago|reply
An existing computer may have something like 5 PCIe slots. That's your limit. But with these thunderbolt ports, you can hook up 6 devices per port. 5 PCIe cards vs a potential of 36? I really don't see how the new Mac Pro is less extendable.
In addition, now that there is no CD Drive, there's no longer any reason why this tower needs to sit where you do. You could theoretically have 40ft Thunderbolt cables drive your displays, and the computer can be neatly stowed away in another room, and just the interfaces (like these cool looking RME devices) and other monitors and editing equipment can stay on your desk.
When it comes time to upgrade, you just replace the "brain", and hook up all the cables to it.
[+] [-] pinaceae|12 years ago|reply
I am not a AV guy, but using my mac mini i started to do the same thing described in the article. rather than byuing an internal hdd, i simply connected a 1tb external drive (silent, sdd). at first I didn't think about it, but this enabled me to:
- Need to transfer files to one of my Windows machines? Simply unplug the hdd from the mac and plug into the Winbox
- Travelling? Take my entire library of stuff with me. No need for DropBox, etc. This works offline, anywhere.
Sounds low tech and slightly too simple, but I'd love to expand this to other functionalities. An external graphics card would be awesome, play games on any machine I want (Mini or Air...).
I've built my own gaming PCs, but by now I would really prefer something more modular, easy, true plug and play.
[+] [-] IverNewson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JonnieCache|12 years ago|reply
They are the only people developing custom USB/firewire controllers, everyone else just sticks a TI chipset in there, wraps the OEM drivers and goes to lunch. Not the plucky germans at RME.
If you need to get audio in or out of your computer, you should settle for nothing less.
[+] [-] mhd|12 years ago|reply
But given the additional power bricks, wires and boxes you need for this, it seems they're optimizing for the non-extended situation and/or want to give their other computers equal footing.
[+] [-] ripperdoc|12 years ago|reply
My suggestion to Apple (or 3PP), would be to make a stackable accessory form factor (along the lines of http://www.123macmini.com/accessories/guide/enclosures.html) with built-in Thunderbolt connectors, or at least cable guides. They could be styled in the same style as the Mac Pro. Imagine just slotting on another level of your little accessory tower, with a single Thunderbolt going to the "capital ship".
[+] [-] mono|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leoc|12 years ago|reply
By the way, I just realised what it is that the base of the new Mac Pro was reminding me of: it's the old G4 iMac, of course http://macspeedzone.com/images/reviews/machines/desktop/imac... .
[+] [-] stephen_g|12 years ago|reply
The only thing I might want is a PCI-Express slot for a RED ROCKET card (it's a hardware decoder for 4K+ video from RED cameras) but I've never really felt the urge to splurge for one of those - both Final Cut Pro X and Premiere Pro are good enough at decoding it with the CPU and GPU even on my MacBook Pro so the Mac Pro should have no problems with it... The only time I feel it is rendering (you can work in 1/4 res [a bit more than 1080p] but for finishing you want full quality even if you're downscaling). And if I did want one, there are a number of adaptors that work with them...
[+] [-] jdboyd|12 years ago|reply
I don't know that TB1 will have enough bandwidth for the new Red Rocket X card, and I'm not yet aware of any TB2 -> PCIe chassis for sale.
[+] [-] pmarin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calinet6|12 years ago|reply
I don't see any problem with this whatsoever.
[+] [-] WalterSear|12 years ago|reply
What is clear from this latest design is that Apple doesn't see audio production as a market worth considering when designing stuff.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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