New Mac Pro and displays

Somnambulist · 4 Apr 2017 at 16:13

Praise be to raptor Jesus, might get a decent 5K monitor after the disaster that is the LG Ultrafine 5K.

Not a Mac Pro owner or potential buyer but good to see they've not given up on it just yet.

https://www.macrumors.com/2017/04/04/apple-updates-mac-pro-and-more/
https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/04/apple-pushes-the-reset-button-on-the-mac-pro/?ncid=rss

Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller via Daring Fireball:

With regards to the Mac Pro, we are in the process of what we call "completely rethinking the Mac Pro." We’re working on it. We have a team working hard on it right now, and we want to architect it so that we can keep it fresh with regular improvements, and we’re committed to making it our highest-end, high-throughput desktop system, designed for our demanding pro customers.

As part of doing a new Mac Pro — it is, by definition, a modular system — we will be doing a pro display as well. Now you won’t see any of those products this year; we’re in the process of that. We think it’s really important to create something great for our pro customers who want a Mac Pro modular system, and that’ll take longer than this year to do.

In the interim, we know there are a number of customers who continue to buy our [current Mac Pros]. To be clear, our current Mac Pro has met the needs of some of our customers, and we know clearly not all of our customers. None of this is black and white, it’s a wide variety of customers. Some… it’s the kind of system they wanted; others, it was not.

In the meantime, we’re going to update the configs to make it faster and better for their dollar. This is not a new model, not a new design, we’re just going to update the configs. We’re doing that this week. We can give you the specifics on that.

The CPUs, we’re moving them down the line. The GPUs, down the line, to get more performance per dollar for customers who DO need to continue to buy them on the interim until we get to a newly architected system.

They're also spec-bumped the existing Mac Pro.

#courage

Somnambulist · 4 Apr 2017 at 16:20

Also Mac Mini:

Near the end, John Paczkowski had the presence of mind to ask about the Mac Mini, which hadn’t been mentioned at all until that point. Schiller: “On that I’ll say the Mac Mini is an important product in our lineup and we weren’t bringing it up because it’s more of a mix of consumer with some pro use. … The Mac Mini remains a product in our lineup, but nothing more to say about it today.”

Somnambulist · 5 Apr 2017 at 22:50

ubersonic said:
Not sure updating the trashcan is going to win many customers, $4000 for a 6 year old GPU and a CPU that gets ragdolled by an entry level Ryzen is a lot to ask. I'm not very open to the idea of basically paying $3000 for a copy of OSX lol.

If they do replace the design with a "modular" one that will be great however I worry it will be "modular" as in you can upgrade it with proprietary Apple components not you can upgrade it with off the shelf components like the old MP...

No 'if' about it; they gathered a few tech journalists for a roundtable and flat out said that they gambled on a particular direction for the trashcan Pro which never materialised and have had to come back with their tail between their legs, say sorry and for once give some insight into a future roadmap for a product line - which they almost never do with their gear these days - and state that sometime in 2018 and beyond they'll be a completely redesigned Mac Pro which will cater for what the actual market requires.

They've slashed (using the figures from the article) $1000 off the current Pro probably just to try and move a few more units; the $3,999 model is now the $2,999 base model and the $3,999 model is what was formerly a built to order model but really they just wanted to get word to Pro-sumer ears if they can be bothered to wait till 2018 they'll get what they should have got 4 years ago.

Not going to buy one myself as I have no need but it was good to see mention that the iMac is going to be updated this year and they'll eventually be a return of the Thunderbolt display.

Somnambulist · 7 Apr 2017 at 12:47

In other news for the Pro crowd, at least the Hackintosh or eGPU users... Nvidia support for their latest behemoth card(s).

Also here's the full transcript of that Mac Pro roundtable if you want to peruse.

Somnambulist · 8 Apr 2017 at 14:40

rotor said:
An interesting comment I read yesterday is that Apple has been unpleasantly surprised by how many of the previous generation MacBook Pro have sold since the release of the new models. In other words, a lot of people are very unhappy with the direction things are going, and this was the final straw to tell Apple, look, you are rapidly alienating and losing your loyal pro users. Several dyed-in-the-wool loyalists I follow have built hackintoshes now.

Jonny Ive needs to retire. I think he's given everything he has to give.

From that roundtable I inferred they're quite happy with their choice to go with the Touch Bar and are keeping it going forward. There's been patents submitted for an Apple Wireless Keyboard with one too. I would personally like to see the bar have some sort of haptic feedback if they're going that route v.s. OLED-capped buttons, just because anyone proficient on a keyboard doesn't tend to look at it much and if you're using a keyboard that gives you physical feedback you don't want part of that keyboard to not give you that, unlike a phone/tablet where what you're typing via touch and the screen are in your field of vision at the same time.

There have been a few bugs with this new gen of MBP but things like the graphics issue on the 15" have been fixed with software updates last time I checked, and of course the battery life thing seems to have been rectified for the most part too.