Mac Pro Late 2013 Teardown

[samatman]

Saying that it's 'shockingly un-apple-like' that the outer case can be removed, shows that the reviewer is handling his first Mac Pro. I still remember the glee I felt, every time I opened my G5 Mac Pro.

My lust for this machine is only growing. It looks like a cross between Darth Vader and R2D2. Love it.

[justin66]

> Saying that it's 'shockingly un-apple-like' that the outer case can be removed, shows that the reviewer is handling his first Mac Pro.

Or that he's insightful enough to recognize that the Mac Pro is an anomaly in the Apple product line.

[Tloewald]

Indeed, Apple's pro macs have generally been ridiculously upgradeable and user-accessible. (Modulo needing to "cover your hands in bandages" before opening up one of the full-sized Mac II series). The 7-series "sidecars", and 8- and 9- series towers, could be completely accessed without tools and had CPUs on upgradeable daughtercards.

[lnanek2]

I remember reading something by Woz where he said he had to fight just to get user expandable memory in the early Apple products. Jobs thought the owner should never open it. So maybe we have Woz to thank for early expandability. Although it was nothing compared to every tiny piece replaceable with an online ordered component IBM clones.

[netcraft]

I hadn't realized how small this is. I was imagining something about 1.5x to 2x as tall from the previous pictures I had seen.

It is impressive how modular they have made it in such as small package, but the inability to expand without thunderbolt is a turnoff to me personally. Maybe once thunderbolt becomes more ubiquitous and cheaper it won't be as big of a deal. Apple wants $30 for a half meter cable http://store.apple.com/us/product/MD861ZM/A/apple-thunderbol...

[agumonkey]

First picture with a hand on it got me mouth-agape. It's a big soda can. Impressive indeed. I wish they chose a more angular form factor, circular feels odd, and oddly not Apple-ish enough.

psedit: I didn't see the can / macpro picture the first time (slow DSL today) psedit2: this level of custom hardware reminds me of the ~70s era, on IBM machines, every piece was as specific as it could get. Beautiful to see, maybe less fun when in need for parts.

[superuser2]

FYI, that "half meter cable" is not simple electrical continuity. There are microcontrollers in the ends handling the data as it passes.

http://www.electronista.com/articles/11/06/29/thunderbolt.ca...

[marknutter]

I'm probably going to be buying one of these today so I've been doing a bit of research. Turns out most everything is user replaceable; most importantly, the processor. So you can save your self a fair bit of cash by buying the base model and upgrading later as needed, which is what I intend to do.

[josephlord]

Xeon processors don't seem to drop in price the way the consumer ones do so you might not save as much as you expect.

Edit: It may still be worth buying the base model now and upgrading immediately if the Apple markup is large.

[e40]

I really want one, but $5400 is too much for the base ($3000) and the disk expansion via Thunderbolt 2 ($2400 for the 6 bay one).

I'm currently looking into a hackintosh that'll set me back about $1700:

http://pcpartpicker.com/user/envoy510/saved/3dCe

I just can't justify the $5400 vs $1700, even though I really do love the design of the new Mac Pro. Also, mine has 32GB of RAM instead of 12GB.

[midgetjones]

That's a pretty good score, considering how unfixable the laptops have become.

[calinet6]

Different tools for different purposes. In my experience, the laptops have not required opening for quite some time, speaking about my retina MBP and Air experiences.

I could upgrade the storage (just 256GB seems small) but I don't really need to... I have all the music I want in the "cloud" (Spotify, Rdio, Pandora) and I keep my video on my home server on an external enclosure I can mount anytime through SSH or watch via Plex.

I could upgrade the video card, but I never have before in a laptop; if I wanted to do things like that, I'd get a desktop.

I could upgrade the memory, but I maxxed it out at 16GB anyway and it won't fit any more.

I could open it to fix things, but there are few moving parts and nothing seems to break.

I might someday need to replace the battery, but on both my rMBPs so far (one owned 1 year, one owned 6 months) the battery has not notably declined in capacity. Even at the end of its life, a reduced 4 hour battery life will be plenty sufficient, and when it finally kicks the bucket, I'm happy to have Apple service it.

In my original 2008 aluminum macbook pro, I replaced the hard drive once, upgraded the memory, and replaced the battery; but none of these things are as relevant or limited as they were in 2009. I have no need for the equivalent upgrades anymore. The machine just works, exactly how I want it to.

[ceejayoz]

Laptops being less serviceable are merely a side effect of the demand for better battery life and smaller devices. Mac Pros don't suffer from that.

[bane]

I wonder how many people will just run this with the case off. It looks so much better to my eyes.

Maybe an aftermarket clear case will show up?

I really hope a similar form factor takes off for custom computer builders.

[archgrove]

Alas, it won't even turn on without its case (http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/23/5234574/apple-mac-pro-rev...). It needs it to guide air through the cooling tower style design. Presumably, someone could make a transparent case as an accessory.

[marknutter]

I think there'd be a market for a third-party glass or clear plastic case, which I believe would serve the same purpose but show of the awesome internals.

[agumonkey]

An vertically extruded triangle form factor would have been superb, like a sibling artefact from 2001.

And Apple already owns triangles http://www.theverge.com/policy/2012/6/7/3068355/Apple-design... ...

[yeukhon]

This is a beautiful machine. It does look odd but every hardware built into the Pro looks amazing fit and stylish. The only complain, of course is when you need all those extra cables and just make the Pro looks uglier. I am going to one of these a year or later, like when the 2nd or even 3rd generation comes out. When iPod first came out, it was a big hit but it was a monster. 2 generations down it was slim.

[gfodor]

I'm pretty sure the form factor is here to stay for a while. Apple isn't going to re-engineer the Mac Pro's case nearly as rapidly as their other consumer devices.

[hashtree]

Seriously impressive design all around. However, I still can't pull myself to spend 10k on one when I can instead do a decked out iMac and then offload processing to ~4 custom built servers with far more total procs/ram/ssd. The only hard to replicate piece is the six channel PCI-E SSD (cost-wise).

This is what I have done for years now, and however much I might like to just for the design... I imagine sticking with it.

[lisp-and-seo]

>> The only hard to replicate piece is the six channel PCI-E SSD (cost-wise)

Not really, all you need are a motherboard supporting (fake) hardware RAID (that's almost any over $100) and a couple of good 240GB SSDs. A RAID 0 will far outperform the MacPro in random access (e.g. OS drive) and in the worst case - sequential reading - will be no more than 10% slower.

The hard to replicate part is the OS, but IMHO Linux and Windows with some UI configuration are superior.

[thirdsight]

Much better than I expected. I've been concerned that they're making lemons recently with the total black box MBPs. iPads I can understand being sealed/disposable but not MBP line machines. Good on Apple for friendly engineering design this time.

Unfortunately for me though, I both can't justify one and can't afford one anyway.

[userbinator]

Those caps in the PSU are going to get pretty cooked judging from their position...

[codex]

Surprise feature: 512GB of DRAM associated with the SSD. Is this a write cache? If so, is it battery backed?

[cdawzrd]

*512MB. This is not an Apple innovation... I believe all SSDs have caches hanging off of the controller, used for both write and read. Flash memory is very much slower than DRAM when writing. This DRAM cache is why many SSDs have better burst performance than sustained write performance. Only the most high-end datacenter-oriented SSDs have backup power, typically supplied by supercapacitors rather than batteries though. I don't see any backup power on this Apple SSD.

[stephann]

I hate apple products lately (macbook pro), well I love them but I hate you cant replace components like RAM and SSD.

I wish they improved soon. As for mac pro, I love design.

[Kiro]

Why can't you replace the SSD?

[mortyseinfeld]

Wow, that thing is freaking cool.

[jokoon]

I hope this is the most mucle-y windows-running computer.