New Mac Pro 2019

[el-bo (formerly ebow)]

2. Major studios that can justify $6000 on each workstation... plus a display

There’s no middle ground. There’s no room at Apple for small business, low-income prosumers/hobbyists who need modular workstations that can survive running CPU and GPU at 100% for hours at a time.

Apple product was never cheap, but it was at least accessible to people who saved a bit and prioritized Mac OS & well-built hardware over cheapness. It hasn’t been accessible for years, and it’s continuing to get worse. Apple are entirely out of touch with the world outside the Silicon Valley/Hollywood corporate ivory towers.

But "small business" is not the same as prosumers, is not the same as hobbyists. $6000 is more money than I would need to spend on a computer. But if I wanted to do all of the things that you want to do, at the level you want to do them, i'd either see it as a worthwhile investment, change to Windows or find cheaper hobbies

[jdnz]

Intel Xeons are already inferior to Threadrippers. It also has only HDD storage and no GPU apparently...

you are obviously not very conversant with machines designed for massive workflows - if you did you won’t be comparing a threadripper to a xeon (for a start no MP on threadripper). Maybe if you compared Epyc to Xeon....

What's the advantage of the Xeon W? According to THIS SITE it doesn't beat the i9

again the i series does not support multiprocessor systems - xeon does. What I do find odd is that the new macpro is ONLY offering single CPU configs....

[jdnz]

Still, 2/3 of the price is absurd 3 TB RAM. I'd love someone to explain what kind of workload could realistically use that much (except constantly leaking software running for a year ).

I know for the molecular dynamics stuff some of our people do massive ram means you can use direct methods (and hence get a huge speed boost). Also in bioinformatics a lot of the tools are seriously ram hungry.

basically we’re now doing stuff on desktops that 10 years ago we’d have been running on our IBM BlueGene, and 5 years ago we’d have been running on a compute server

[fmr]

Intel Xeons are already inferior to Threadrippers. It also has only HDD storage and no GPU apparently...

you are obviously not very conversant with machines designed for massive workflows - if you did you won’t be comparing a threadripper to a xeon (for a start no MP on threadripper). Maybe if you compared Epyc to Xeon....

What's the advantage of the Xeon W? According to THIS SITE it doesn't beat the i9

again the i series does not support multiprocessor systems - xeon does. What I do find odd is that the new macpro is ONLY offering single CPU configs....

Which justifies my doubts. What's the advantyage of having a Xeon W in these machines? Except that maybe they are cheaper than i9 CPUs (which they are).

[V0RT3X]

Fundamentally, desktop and server CPUs are the same but with 2 key differences:

Server CPUs are expected to run at nearly 100% performance for nearly 100% of the time for nearly 100% of their lifetimes, even if they do not end up doing so. This means they are samples of the very highest quality parts being manufactured by the vendor and quality control will have wheedled out those parts that are not capable of delivering this requirement. (Some of the parts that failed “QA” may actually be sold as inferior models of the processor or even desktop processors). Server CPUs cost a lot of money to make, buy and run.

Server CPUs have additional internal components that may simply be larger internal memory caches (esp L2 cache) or include additional execution engines or even complete additional instruction sets (such as Intel’s Advanced Vector Instructions) that are almost exclusively used by specialist or enterprise software that is just no run on desktops. They often include additional hardware components to allow them to address very large memory arrays (servers often contain terabytes [TB] of RAM these days!), very large numbers or high capacity IO devices, or connect many server CPUs together in a single machine.

[Jace-BeOS]

2. Major studios that can justify $6000 on each workstation... plus a display

There’s no middle ground. There’s no room at Apple for small business, low-income prosumers/hobbyists who need modular workstations that can survive running CPU and GPU at 100% for hours at a time.

Apple product was never cheap, but it was at least accessible to people who saved a bit and prioritized Mac OS & well-built hardware over cheapness. It hasn’t been accessible for years, and it’s continuing to get worse. Apple are entirely out of touch with the world outside the Silicon Valley/Hollywood corporate ivory towers.

But "small business" is not the same as prosumers, is not the same as hobbyists. $6000 is more money than I would need to spend on a computer. But if I wanted to do all of the things that you want to do, at the level you want to do them, i'd either see it as a worthwhile investment, change to Windows or find cheaper hobbies

Yeah, cheaper hobbies... I chose computer art because it was supposed to be less expensive than buying art materials and easier than using all hardware to make music, etc etc...

Thing is, it didn’t used to take effing $6000 for a base Mac Pro. It was possible to buy a new Mac Pro for $2500. Then they stepped it up another $500. And then they kicked it up to 200% of the price of the last one.

[Jace-BeOS]

Exactly, a 2019 iMac or a Mac Mini or even the 16" Macbook Pro is going to be enough for the majority of us who just use Logic/Cubase/Ableton etc.

What if you want to do music in Logic... and also do photography on a high-PPI display... and maybe get back to 3D rendering... AND do some moderate gaming on your “blow off steam” recreation time... all on one computer?

Then you're very a clever person

Ha ha, I wish. No one wants to pay me for any of my knowledge, so I guess I’m worthless.

No seriously, if you're doing it as a profession then your company will pay for the equipment. If it's a hobby, then it's probably out of your price range? Until the cost of High-PPI displays come down or if other manufacturers start mass-producing them then you're stuck with what you've got.

There was a time when I thought I might be able to become my own employer, but that’s just a damned pipe dream delusion. This is all on me. It’s definitely outside my price range, and I’ve been saving for YEARS.

Honestly, Hackintosh is probably the only the middle-ground if you want to stick with MacOS.

That is absolutely NOT something I want to do. I’m sick of being my own tech support (I don’t even want to support other people’s computers... unless they’re legit Macs).

And yes, Apple is expensive, but generally, I find that they last longer.

So long as they’re not running hot all day, I agree. Run them hot and they slow down, and they may eventually die from thermal fatigue. My MacBook Pro 3,1 went that way (Half-Life 2 and networked 3D rendering nodes killed it, possibly due to a NVidia design flaw or maybe just the fact that a laptop is ill-suited for this kind of thermal stress).

My MBP 2013 is still used on the road with Logic so I'm not sure what you mean by 3-year software support.

The next version of Mac OS to come along will mean High Sierra is dropped for Logic support. These tend to be yearly.

Then there’s the Apple ecosystem: I’m already refusing iWork updates on iOS because it would mean my Mac OS versions can’t read the files saved by the iOS versions. I’m even still only just on iOS 12.x, because I don’t trust what I’ve seen with iOS 13. iCloud functionality sucks, too, with this mix of versions of stuff. The notifications and reminders are all screwy (one device won’t accept notification status changes on another unless forced), and Universal Clipboard hasn’t worked since day one.

[Uncle E]

And yes, Apple is expensive, but generally, I find that they last longer. My MBP 2013 is still used on the road with Logic so I'm not sure what you mean by 3-year software support. If I had a Acer laptop (for example), it'll probably need upgrading after 4-5 years. They do charge more, but they're actually quite competitive based on longevity/product spec/software. To me its not just a laptop, its a work tool.

Agreed. My 2011 MacBook Air, 2013 MacBook Air, and 2012 iMac are in use 16+ hours per day and still going strong. Also, every time new models come out, the mac addicts sell off their previous year hardware for cheap. I've never bought a new Mac.

[agharta]

Intel Xeons are already inferior to Threadrippers. It also has only HDD storage and no GPU apparently...

you are obviously not very conversant with machines designed for massive workflows - if you did you won’t be comparing a threadripper to a xeon (for a start no MP on threadripper). Maybe if you compared Epyc to Xeon....

Xeon is a brand name for a wide range of Intel CPUs many of which are 1S (1 socket) only.
Apple only offer a single socket Xeon anyway.
EPYC is available as 1S and 2S but not sure if more than that!
The single socket 64 core EPYC is shown to beat a dual socket high end Xeon in some and possibly most workloads.
The current 32 core Threadripper will trounce the highest spec Xeon in the new Mac Pro and there's a 64 core version due next year.
The Mac supports much more RAM but that's not relevant for DAW usage.
The AMD platforms also support PCIe 4.0 which doubles the maximum bandwidth for SSDs and graphics cards versus the version 3 on the Mac.
So it's overpriced and under specified for high end DAW usage, comparatively speaking.
For a high end workstation it has inferior CPUs and Nvidia are considered the market leaders so also the wrong choice of GPUs generally speaking.

But, I'm sure if you pony up 10k you will have a lovely DAW machine that will keep you happy for years.
It's not as if an iMac Pro is going to be cheap.
Painful to see the prices from the outside but that's the risk when you are locked in with a vendor that has a monopoly.

[gnosis123]

And yes, Apple is expensive, but generally, I find that they last longer. My MBP 2013 is still used on the road with Logic so I'm not sure what you mean by 3-year software support. If I had a Acer laptop (for example), it'll probably need upgrading after 4-5 years. They do charge more, but they're actually quite competitive based on longevity/product spec/software. To me its not just a laptop, its a work tool.

Agree. I am still on a 2010 Mac Pro, having upgraded the CPUs and memory just once during that time. It's still mostly fine, but I had been looking forward to the new Mac Pro. Apart from the sticker shock (which I can - sorta - rationalize if I only rev machines once every 10 years), I've read it will probably be Catalina only (i.e.,. not even downgradeable to Mojave - can anyone confirm/deny?). Catalina won't run 32-bit apps/plugs and is not yet supported by many of my plugin vendors. So it looks like for now I will have to keep pimping my old ride, like one of those ancient gas guzzlers in Mad Max...

[Jace-BeOS]

I can’t imagine it on anything older than a unique Mac Pro version of Catalina when it ships to people’s doors. This is another reason it will be not a quick uptake on people buying them in certain use-case scenarios...

But software developers have had quite a long time to update their code on betas of Catalina (and the last many years of Mac OS in general). Many developers actually have 64-bit products but 32-bit installers. Then there’s the tiny-ass bitmaps in their tiny-ass GUIs that they all seem to act like are permanent...

[V0RT3X]

Honestly if you are wanting a kick ass workstation in 2020 for cheaper than apples top of the line offerings, honestly I'd go with a custom windows system using the AMD Epyc stuff.

I'm a mac guy, own a old fully loaded trashcan (bought it refurbished and it was still expensive..)

but honestly it's so much more cheaper to go with AMD and custom these days.

This is just nuts..

epyc4.jpg

Note: Yes I know it's still very expensive for the average joe, but the power available at the price point now a days is insane..

If i had the money and it was no object, honestly i'd go with a Mac Pro because i like the FCPX workflow. However realistically going with a setup based around the epyc architecture makes more financial sense.

Logic Pro X - Cubase, Ableton etc


Final Cut Pro X - DaVinci Resolve, Premiere


https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... =emb_title

[gnosis123]

Vid w/ new Mac Pro & Catalina doing studio work:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jv5HIrOrn2o

[Astralv]

I was ready to buy one for my video stuff and started a configuration including the screen , but certain things are really hard to swallow.
Like $400 for the wheels , $999 for the monitor stand , $999 for extra matte screen ??!!

That's the price of a Macbook pro.

I mean wtf ?

I would love to boycott this if there were comparable durable, stable systems available.

You can. It calls Windows.

[Astralv]

The scary thing is there's morons out there happy to pay and encourage this lunacy!
Apple now truly sat in the garden of Eden haha

People who freak about macpro prices have obviously never purchased high end dell precision or hp z8 series workstations - it’s quite easy to spec either of them such they cost 2-4 times the cost of a maxed out macpro

No, it is not! I have 6 builds here and none of them cost more than 2k.