Record profits for Apple, yet no new MacPro??

If they drop the Mac Pro line, Mac Pro users will not switch to MacMinis, we will switch to Windows or Linux. We will then in all likelihood stop buying ancillary Apple products. I would be suprised if Apple couldn't figure that out.

Just saying. The MacPro line should be much more frequently upgraded. They are squeezing every penny out of these old chips. It's redicoules to pay that much money for the current premium configuration. .Graphic Cards are old etc...

There is a reason behind that. No one buys MacPros... beside us few Pros.

Which is fine. Frankly, the things don't need to be upgraded that often. I would be hard pressed to justify spending 4k$ a year on new systems that are only slightly different then the old ones.

Next generation of Xeons includes thunderbolt, SATA 3 and USB 3. I don't see the sense in Apple pushing out a new model till then.

Well obviously they upgrade all other products every year. But no one said we have to buy it. I like to skip one version and feel strange that the pro line as such a long wait. my 2009 Pro could be upgraded now, however I would never buy the current outdated mac. So what do I do for my business, wait?

beside that the options to upgrade are just weak. 3D animators need better graphic cards. My guys at the shop need more power, and that's unfortunately only available with PC/Linux. Which is said and hence I was adding my comment to this post.

Cheers,
D

If they drop the Mac Pro line, Mac Pro users will not switch to MacMinis, we will switch to Windows or Linux. We will then in all likelihood stop buying ancillary Apple products.

I would be suprised if Apple couldn't figure that out.

Trust me, they CAN figure it out. Imagine that there was no Mac Pro.

Dell's new slogan would be “Twice as fast, as the fastest Mac".

The Mac Pro is the computer of choice for Hollywood movie makers (Apple's most important and pursued market). Further, while the Mac Pro is used primarily by “power users”, these are the people who influence others on what computer to buy.

As an owner of several Mac pros I have personally influenced over 100 people to switch from Windows to Macintosh. These people generally do not purchase a Mac Pro but one of the other desktop computers.

If the Mac Pro were to go, I would go to Windows.

Power: Although the iMac is an extremely powerful machine in its own right, the Mac Pro's performance still kicks the iMac's butt all the way up and down the block. Benchmark performance in Geekbench shows the 12-core 2.93 GHz Mac Pro coming in with an astounding score of 21,789. That's nearly twice the 11,581 score earned by the most powerful iMac, a quad-core 3.4 GHz model.

Benchmarks only tell part of the story, however. A Mac Pro that's been maxed-out on Apple's online store with as much RAM and hard disk capacity as you can shove into it is a Godzilla of a machine:

• Two 2.93 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon processors (for a total of 12 cores)

• 8 TB of internal storage

• 64 GB of RAM

• Two ATI Radeon HD 5770 with 1 GB of video RAM -- each.

The best you can do with an iMac via Apple's configuration options?

• 3.4GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7

• 2 TB HDD + 256 GB SSD

• 16 GB RAM

• AMD Radeon HD 6970M with 2 GB of video RAM

The top-end iMac is an incredibly powerful machine by consumer and even professional standards, but a fully-upgraded Mac Pro is practically ostentatious in the amount of raw processing power it can wield. Professional consumers in areas like 3D rendering, video editing, and other extremely processor-intensive applications surely appreciate the much greater power the Mac Pro can afford them.

Customization:

The Mac Pro stomps the iMac in the customization department. Folding down the Mac Pro's side door gives you easy and almost instant access to its innards, and virtually every component is simple to swap out. Hard drives in particular are extraordinarily easy to swap in the Mac Pro.

Contrast that with the iMac, where the RAM is essentially the only user-serviceable component. Swapping out the hard drive on an iMac is a harrowing procedure that requires removing the entire front display -- not something you're going to want to do more than once, if ever. You could argue that the iMac's Thunderbolt capability vastly expands its customization options (and I will, later on), but it still doesn't quite measure up to the amount of customization available to a Mac Pro.

Artificial benchmarks are of little use to a Pro. Sadly the best Mac for video work right now is an iMac because it has received regular updates.

I do lots of video work also. I consistently get better performance from my Mac Pro.

In my case, I use my Mac Pro to write cross platform and web enabled software (Salesforce for the most part these days). I need a lot of RAM, a RAID-1 and Time Machine. In addition I need a lot of cores as I run several virtual machines at once (using VMWare Fusion right now). I could do all of this on a PC without much issue. I went with the Mac Pro because I like the UNIX under pinnings of OS X and for the computational power, the Mac Pro is very quiet. I could not find a comparable machine from another vendor that didn't make my office sound like a wind tunnel.

I have rarely if ever been accusted of 'siding' with but I do follow Intel roadmap.

Short term gains rather than a full appreciation.

To me, there has been little in 6 yrs, just a small tweak here and there but no real change but some small speedbumps along the way.

Which is why a 2006 (2005 actually) MacPro1,1 outfitted with a pair of 5355s for $500 + 5770 + SSD and the only thing missing is 64-bit UEFI kernel support and with that support for 48GB and above.

THAT is a sad story.

Not that I don't like 10K score out of a simple i7-920 clocked to 3.2GHz and 12GB along with SSD, and my choice of graphic card, PSU, and case of my choosing/cooling.

But to come out with anything ? what's the rush? Burning a whole with hot $$$ you need to spend before tax day?

Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs may launch in March

SAN FRANCISCO--Intel Corp.’s 22-nm Ivy Bridge CPUs will likely launch in March, ... Xeon E5 processors are all Sandy Bridge-EP, while Xeon E3 is Ivy Bridge, ...

Intel’s Xeon E5 server offerings will also launch later than expected. “The Xeon E5 slipped a quarter, primarily due to platform level validation and lack of competitive pressure,” Kanter said adding, "AMD's Interlagos is somewhat late as well."

Xeon E5 processors are all Sandy Bridge-EP, while Xeon E3 is Ivy Bridge, but only single socket.

"Intel had always hedged the timeline for the E5 series, partially because of the platform changes such as integrated PCI-E 3.0," Kanter concluded.

Burning a whole with hot $$$ you need to spend before tax day?

What is "tax day" ?

I hope other IT managers read this and comment on their plans, I would like to know how many of us are waiting to buy palates full of MacPros and displays for our video editing, interactive media and art departments. I am.

I have been approved to replace our art department systems as of October 2011. I typically buy the midrange MacPro and 24 inch-ish screen for each of our artists. Since I kept our last fleet of "MacPro" for nearly 6 years, I'm not about to settle for the current one/two year old design. I may spring for the high end MacPro this time around if its performance is a significant jump over a lesser config and its operating system and applications can actually fully use all the cores, memory, etc... We were aware of the rumblings about the Intel processors that were delayed and expected to be the chosen one for the MacPro Q4/2011-Q1/2012 and recently seen some chatter about the chipset needing some fixes. These are matters for Intel, not Apple. Either way, its never going to be as bad as it was with Motorola delays.

You all should not bother debating the death of a MacPro. I'm not impressed by iMacs and their chassis manages heat poorly. Try running 4 HD videos for about 10 minutes and then touch the area where the hard drive is located, but be careful, don't burn yourself. If you have been around a datacenter you know that to keep things alive a long time you keep them cool. Heat is always a guaranteed FAIL.

Look at it this way, lets say Apple had released a new Mac Pro with a slightly faster CPU at this last Mac World expo. Then next month Intel releases the new CPUs. All the people complaining about the lack of new Mac Pros would then be complaining that Apple didn't wait for the new CPUs and that they "wasted" their money on now obsolete hardware.

If the new CPUs are released and we still dont see any new Mac Pros, then we can start to complain. Till then, its kind of a wasted effort.