Apple commitment to Mac Pro line?

A top of the line iMac is a very powerful computer.

4GHz quad core i7, 32GB RAM, 4GB graphics, 1TB SSD or 3TB Fusion drive, 5K display, one 5K or two 4K external displays, 2 Thunderbolt ports.

The only advantages of the Mac Pro are:

More CPU cores (at a lower speed) and a second graphics card, which will help if you do a lot of video rendering.

More Thunderbolt ports, for more (lower resolution) displays and lots of simultaneous disk transfers.

I agree that the Mac Pro is overkill. As for Mac Pro upgrades, until Intel releases significantly better server class CPUs and Thunderbolt 3, there is not much Mac Pro upgrading for Apple to do. They don't sell enough of them to make small yearly updates worthwhile.

Your local guy is right in saying that the current Mac Pro is probably overkill for photography. Adobe apps don't benefit from the way it's configured. Nor does it have some of the advantages of previous Mac Pros (room for 4 internal drives, etc.). I would love to see Apple dump the 2013 design and return to some sort of tower format.

I really dislike the idea of moving to an iMac, although I know lots of graphics people have done it. It's a monitor with a squished computer stuck to the back of it, and if something goes wrong with either the display or the computer, you have the use of neither. I'd rather choose the monitor myself, so that I can have one with a matte screen, and be able to use it with more than one computer. My current NEC display is shared by 4 computers.

I like what you said except in this area, you have been much too kind to Adobe:

Adobe apps don't benefit from the way it's configured.

Despite lost of BIG TALK about writing support software to enable their packages to perform well on AMD graphics cards (such as those in the late 2013 Mac Pro dark cylinder) Adobe has NOT stepped up and written the software required for good support on ANY AMD cards. This has left Apple and its Final Cut Pro -X as nearly the only top-performing High-end Applications for this computer.

Adobe instead has continued to provide good performance ONLY for NVIDIA graphics cards proprietary CUDA support.

I agree with others who have said there have been few appropriate leaps in the technology behind Apple's server-class computers. It is not being ignored, there just have not been appropriate new stuff that could be added to improve it.

They could do a speed-bump, but you can already choose from a wide selection of fast CPUs.

Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:

I like what you said except in this area, you have been much too kind to Adobe:

Adobe apps don't benefit from the way it's configured.

Despite lost of BIG TALK about writing support software to enable their packages to perform well on AMD graphics cards (such as those in the late 2013 Mac Pro dark cylinder) Adobe has NOT stepped up and written the software required for good support on ANY AMD cards. This has left Apple and its Final Cut Pro -X as nearly the only top-performing High-end Applications for this computer.

Adobe instead has continued to provide good performance ONLY for NVIDIA graphics cards proprietary CUDA support.

I apologize for my inadvertent kindness to Adobe. I was having a weak moment. To be fair, Adobe has other priorities, such as trying to bully small graphics businesses whose employees have individual CC licenses, which are perfectly legit, into switching to a different plan that, suprise, surprise, costs $20 a month more.

if my lovely silver 2010 Mac Pro tower were to die tomorrow, I would replace it with a used, more powerful, lovely silver Mac Pro tower.

Going to a 2010 or 2012 model would still give you a nice boost over the 2008 model.

Based on normal refresh cycles the Mac Pro is well overdue for an update however I understand and agree with Apple not yet doing this. Apple I believe are waiting for certain new chips to become available to make it worthwhile doing a major update to the Mac Pro. (Apple of course have not officially said anything about this.)

I believe Apple are waiting for a new Intel CPU a Skylake generation Xeon CPU which is I believe now available, this as well as being faster will add support for USB 3.1 and Thunderbolt 3. They are also waiting for a new AMD GPU chip the R9 400 series which is due out this summer I believe. This new AMD chip should include support for Displayport 1.3, HDMI 2.0, and HDCP 2.2. Rumours suggest this new Mac Pro will use just USB Type C connectors which also support Thunderbolt 3 over the same connector.

Note: The new AMD chip will therefore support 5K monitors over a single cable. This in turn might result in Apple finally releasing a new Thunderbolt 3 monitor with a 5K resolution.

So now the main delay is down to AMD. (Allegedly.)

For most people even a current Mac Pro is overkill. The current Mac Pro can drive multiple 4K screens and can even drive three 5K screens.

If you can afford a new Mac Pro, have a need for a Mac Pro rather than an iMac or simply have money to burn then waiting a bit longer is probably worth while. There are various upgrades you can do to your Classic Mac Pro to extend its life.

Hi Jan,

my advice for your mac pro 2008 will be: keep it as a working horse as long as it is in good conditions.

Yes, for many jobs with low requirements it will be overkill. And the early mac pros are known as power hungry. Very hungry. But that is the only reason that speaks against them.

Last year i bought a used mp 2010 / 5.1. The main reasons i bought this power doomsday machine for are big ecc ram (i love the error correction), many cores, expandability, exchangeable video card. My main software (kolor autopano giga, for gigapixel panorama rendering) will work better with more ram, and better with more cores than with faster cpu.

When adobe and it´s lack of support for older video cards is an issue for you, have a look at macvidcards.com, they have modern video cards, both amd and nvidia, from low cost up to high-end, that are flashed for macintosh. And some of them will support 5k displays too.

greetings from germany

Chris

Jan Becket wrote:

This is interesting - thanks for the list of possible upgrades to the Mac Pro. Kahjotʻs suggestion to pick up a 2012 silver Mac Pro seems like the sensible way to go at this point - if I can locate a 5K 27" display equivalent to the Apple thunderbolt screen. If those upgrades happen, however, the Mac Pro is going to be tempting — overkill as it is.

The 5K screen everyone is using at the moment with either a classic Mac Pro or the current Mac Pro or current iMac is the Dell UP2715K.

A Nvidia GTX 970 or GTX 980 from Macvidcards can drive this in the classic Mac Pro.

I have a 2010 Mac Pro and have upgraded the CPU chips, the video card, upgraded the WiFi & Bluetooth, added USB3, a PCIe SSD drive, and even added a SATA III upgrade for the internal drive bays. Apart from the lack of Thunderbolt it is almost as good as a current Mac Pro. (Most of the upgrades were secondhand including the Mac Pro itself and hence this was not a hugely expensive process.)

> and even added a SATA III upgrade for the internal drive bays

For the internal drive bays? How can this be done?

Which parts must be exchanged, which interface card card must be added?

Until now, i only have seen sata cards for external drives, and one that can carry two 2.5" drives as piggyback (uhm, right word? in german: Huckepack).

greetings from germany

Chris

For the majority of people there is no justification for upgrading the internal drive bays to SATA III, as I mentioned I got the parts secondhand and therefore cheaper and did it more because I could then really needing to. Remember that traditional hard disk drives simply cannot go fast enough to need SATA III speed, only an SSD drive will get a benefit. However here are the details on how to do it.

If you have a Mac Pro 2006 to 2008 model Mac then this design has a cable going from the drive bays to the logic board and the connection on the logic board is a standard miniSAS connector. It is therefore possible to unplug this cable from the logic board and extend it to a PCIe card with a miniSAS connector and this PCIe card would then act as a SATA III controller. See this article for more details http://blog.macsales.com/12247-upgrade-your-06-08-mac-pros-internal-bays-to-sata -3-0

I would not necessarily get the PCIe card referred to by that article as according to the MacSales website it does not support booting in to OS X. I would instead get one of the following.

https://www.startech.com/uk/Cards-Adapters/HDD-Controllers/SATA-Cards/PCI-Expres s-SATA-III-RAID-Controller-Card-Mini-SAS…

https://www.attotech.com/products/adapters/sas-sata/6gb-pcie-30/ESAS-H644-000

https://www.attotech.com/products/adapters/sas-sata-raid/6gb/ESAS-R644-000%20ESA S-R644-C00

(The last in the list above is a hardware RAID controller and therefore more expensive.)

I know from personal experience the first two work fine for both booting in to OS X and even Boot Camp although you need to first install the Windows driver to enable Boot Camp booting. This can be done by first installing Windows and the Windows driver via the original SATA II interface and then swapping it to the SATA III interface.

If you have a Mac Pro 2009, 2010, or 2012 model then the process to upgrade the drive bays is a bit more complex and expensive. It is not possible on these models to simply disconnect them from the logic board. Instead you need to buy special drive sleds which bypass the built-in SATA II connection but still utilise the built-in power connection, you then use a miniSAS fan-out cable to connect each of these special drive sleds to again a PCIe card and again the same choices as I listed above would work. For the special drive sleds and miniSAS fan-out cable you need to get these from here. http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&product_i d=189%20

I have a secondhand Mac Pro 2010, I also got a secondhand MaxUpgrades set of drive sleds and cable, and got a StarTech PCIe card. With a SATA III SSD drive I do see an improvement in speed and I have it working in both OS X even in El Capitan, and also in Windows 10 via Boot Camp.

Hi John,

yes i see how much technical effort must be taken. Mine is a mp 2010, the simple disconnect cable / connect cable will not work. And i already have special tray sleds for the longer mounting hole distance of 6tb and 8tb drives.

So this https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/PCIe/OWC/Mercury_Accelsior/RAID or this http://www.sonnettech.com/PRODUCT/tempossdproplus.html might be a better choice for me.

Thank you!

greetings from germany

Chris