The new Mac Pro…

Back in 2011, I wrote the following regarding the “writing being on the wall” with Apple eventually ditching the optical drive in all of their form factors.  I also pondered about the future of the Mac Pro (as far as being this huge box with tons of internal expansion capabilities) in both of these prior postings.

If one looks generally at Apple products over the years, the tendency has leaned heavily towards smaller/thinner products.  The Mac Pro tower was one of those exceptions because this type of form factor is what customers in that particular demographic have tended to gravitate towards for many reasons (which I’ll get into below).

Over the past few years, the Mac Pro has been pretty much a red-headed step child in the Mac family; seeing very little in the way of major upgrades since it saw its last large one back in 2010.  My main system is one of those 2010 models; a 6-core 3.33GHz model which now sports around 12.5TB of internal disk space, 1 eSATA PCIe card, and 1 PCIe Excelsior E2 128GB SSD drive (for my boot volume) and 24GB of RAM.

After doing the SSD upgrade back in February, one of the main bottlenecks affecting responsiveness was addressed.  To make a long story short, for a couple of hundred dollars in upgrades over the past 3 years, I’ve basically extended the life of this system a few more years.  The longest I’ve ever extended my main Mac desktop in this manner was my old Quicksilver 2002 Power Mac G4 (4 years before it was replaced by a 1st generation Mac Pro in 2006).

My current Mac Pro is heading into it’s 3rd year now, and unlike my last few systems, doesn’t feel like it is hitting that point where I’m hitting the upper limits of its performance – this one has at least 2 years of very usable performance left on it within the current software landscape.  Higher resolution video (Ultra Def or 4K for example) is what will eventually do my current system in.

But I do realize there are customers out there who are constantly hitting the performance ceiling because their work demands the highest level of performance, and for those folks, the Mac Pro line was becoming long in the tooth in terms of keeping up with the advances that have occurred over the past year and a half.

Namely, while the rest of Apple’s Mac lines have been upgraded with Thunderbolt I/O and Intel’s newer processor architecture, the Mac Pro saw only a modest performance update in the processor and graphics department in 2012.  The Mac mini for example has had Thunderbolt since 2011.  While Thunderbolt adoption still hasn’t taken off, it was still ironic that Apple’s flagship/top of the line system, lacked this next generation I/O (while the rest of its consumer siblings eventually included the port).

The general thinking (mine included) at one point was that these systems would eventually be EOL’d (end of life) much like how the Xserve was cancelled in 2011 (and along with it, the majority of Apple’s goodwill with the enterprise and the SMB market).  It didn’t help with the Final Cut X fiasco which alienated some of Apple’s pro video editing customer base to the point of looking elsewhere from both a software and hardware perspective.  Someone even e-mailed CEO Tim Cook in June 2012 inquiring if the Mac Pro was dead; Cook surprisingly responded that a new Mac Pro (but little other details) would be released some time in 2013.

Well at this years Apple World Wide Developer Conference, the company gave a very rare preview of the new Mac Pro which will be released later this year.  Unsurprisingly (at least to me), the form factor was not very far off the mark from what I’d written about 2 years ago; where internal expansion when it came to both disk storage and expansion cards, would be external to the core system.

The design itself borrows heavily from the Power Mac G4 Cube which also had a central (fanless) cooling system comprised of heat sinks, with the main logic board surrounding that core.  The Cube did have space for a fan at the bottom of this core  (showing that it was designed for a higher thermal envelope which never materialized since the product was not a commercial success due to poor price/performance).   With the new Mac Pro, the entire logic board, graphics, and PCIe flash drive are laid out in a triangular fashion around a central cooling system with a single fan at the top.  The entire system is encased in a cylindrical aluminum housing standing just 6.6″ wide and 9.9″ tall.  So instead of rehashing the cube form factor, they went with a tube.

For some, the system at first glance looks like one of those newfangled trash cans (which no doubt, will be used by detractors/Mac haters to state their opinion of the product).  Still, one cannot deny the audacity of this form factor where one can’t help but take a curious look at it (and /or at least appreciate the engineering that went into it).  And while SVP of Marketing Phil Schiller said the introduction would be a little over the top, the unveiling really had that same hyperbolic feeling of past Steve Jobs’ product intros; something which I felt has been honestly lacking anything post iPad 1.0 release.  It was the first time in awhile that I actually laughed out loud and had that initial, “gotta have it” reaction (though the usual reality sets in once one has time to absorb all of the information).

Again, reducing the volume of the form factor to 1/8th of the current tower, meant sacrificing some of the current systems main advantages; internal disk storage and expansion cards.  Like all other Mac’s, the Pro finally eschews the optical drive.  The graphics cards look to be a custom design (the G4 Cube used an ATI Radeon PCI graphics card but one that was custom made to be slightly shorter than those normally found in desktop computers) but the 4 memory slots and flash drive are both slotted meaning they can be upgraded.  This likely represents the extent of the internal upgradability.  Everything else will need to handled externally via Thunderbolt 2 (either dedicated devices or an external PCIe chassis).

This particular aspect of the new Mac Pro creates some rather polarizing opinions which for someone like myself, can understand both sides of the argument.  Myself, I’ve always been a desktop/tower form factor sort of person mainly due to the desire of having a box which houses a good portion of my storage needs.  During the Power Mac 8500 period, that tower had room for only two internal hard drives.  Thus, I went with a variety of external drives which created a headache (SCSI issues, spaghetti wires, wasted space) before I went with a 4 drive storage tower (which was big and loud).  I therefore was never a big fan of having most of my storage external.

One of my biggest gripes with Apple over the years is how form over practical functionality some times ended up taking priority (in both hardware and software).  A perfect example of this was the old Apple Studio Display CRT which had these large tripod legs (pictured below).

The footprint it consumed (especially on the 21″ model) on ones desk was excessive whereas there were many other large monitors at the time with a highly functional, practical, and equally aesthetically pleasing central stand which had a smaller footprint.  The 17″ Apple Studio Display LCD and 22″ Apple Cinema Display LCD also emphasized form over functionality since it’s rear central leg only offered a shallow range of movement when it came to angling your display.  The original 15″ Studio Display on the otherhand, while somewhat ugly, had a fairly functional stand which could move up/down and the monitor panel itself, tilted up/down and rotated.  Apple at it’s design best though created something like the flat panel iMac G4 with its semi-spherical base which had an ingenious articulating arm that allowed the display to be positioned in any viewing angle.  Incidentally, the new Mac Pro’s bottom is inspired by the bottom of the iMac G4’s case (same vent design).

One of the most infamous design failures (IMHO was the completely round hockey puck mouse which shipped with the translucent Mac’s of the above period.  One of the first things I did was replace those with a traditional 2 button mouse.  These are only the tip of the iceberg, and software wise, I’ve made previous postings here about some of the issues I’ve had with some software products and/or features.

Digressing, with my current Mac Pro, I have 5 internal SATA disk drives (the 5th is on a sled adapter in the 2nd optical bay drive) and a PCIe SSD.  It’s an elegant form factor which works perfectly for me.  With the new Mac Pro,  I’d need some sort of external Thunderbolt multiple drive enclosure (sort of like the raid box shown in the above posting).  This adds several hundred dollars to the overall total cost of ownership in the process.  As for my PCIe cards, lets just say I can part with that aspect (since something like an PCIe chassis would make no financial sense for me).

However, as I had noted in the above previous postings, with Thunderbolt (which is a hardware interface that combines both PCIe and Display Port into a single serial signal), the need to build these volumnous boxes so that it can house these expansion slots (for cards which most average folks don’t use), seemed to becoming more of a niche.  And as noted in those previous postings, when the Mac mini received the interface, meant this once non-expandable system, could possibly take advantage of a wide array of high performance peripherals.  Thus Apple can deliver smaller form factor products which are easier to inventory and ship.

Basically, some who are in the Mac Pro’s target demographic, feel very strongly about a form factor that offers a ton of internal expansion capabilities, while there are others who have no issues with external expansion.  Myself, my opinion lands somewhere in the middle.  For Apple, there literally is no middle ground.  It’s not in the DNA and is not their modus operandi to support things which they consider legacy.  They did it with the 5.25″ floppy, SCSI, Apple Desktop Bus, serial ports, 3.5″ floppy, Classic (OS 9) support in OS X, Rosetta (PPC support), optical drives, etc.

The new Mac Pro continues this trend.  They could continue to upgrade and keep the huge tower Mac Pro around for those who want the internal expansion capabilities, while offering the smaller cylindrical Mac Pro as a smaller (but higher performance than a mini) offering.  But that isn’t how Apple works.  Sure, there are times when they prudently transition slowly away from what they see as legacy tech.  Other times though, the axe is swift and quick.  In the case of the new Mac Pro, this is their vision of the future of high end computing and they’ve
left the idea of a big tower behind them because they don’t see the future as requiring large amounts of internal disk storage and expansion card slots.

And part of the immediate ditching of what Apple considers as legacy is to spur the innovation needed for 3rd party companies to deliver solutions in a shorter time frame.  This happened when Apple went all USB with the first iMac.  There was a lot of bitching and moaning by those who had a large investment in ADB devices.  But companies did fill the void relatively quickly with USB/ADB adapters (for those who had Wacom tablets or still preferred using their Apple Extended Keyboard (which to date, I consider one of the best keyboards ever made outside of the IBM PC AT keyboard, the Leading Edge D series keyboards, and my current aluminum Apple Keyboard).  There were some who moaned about the loss of the internal floppy back in 1998 and deemed external USB options as unelegant.  While I bought one of those just in case, I ended up using it only once or twice.

It’s hard to imagine that mechanical hard drives will eventually disappear with its current cost per gigabyte advantage.  I doubt they won’t for awhile especially in large RAID’s.  Currently, they top out at 3 terabytes and don’t bust ones bank account in the process.  But the rate of increasing the density per platter has slowed in recent years and one of the biggest I/O bottlenecks in the system is now the mechanical hard drive and its SATA interface.  Flash storage is making it’s way their with single blade capacities (used in PCIe solutions) hitting 480 gigabytes.  Though they currently are not cheap, economies of scale will eventually kick in the way it did for hard drives and RAM once more companies begin to transition to PCIe based SSD’s.  Increased capacity will happen with time to where it will eventually intersect with the mechanical hard drive.  It will only over take the hard drive once the cost per gigabyte narrows between the two.  At that time, it will be far easier for Apple to include additional PCIe sockets for these blades (though I don’t envision being able to get the same 12.5TB of internal disk storage I currently have with affordable flash for at least the next 5 years).

IMHO, depending on the starting pricing point of this new Mac Pro, it could either remain a high end niche (which means that the uptake of Thunderbolt will continue to lag along due to the lack of critical mass to drive an array of lower cost/affordable peripherals, as well as a cottage industry of industrial designed external storage systems for both cards and disk storage) or it could offer a middle ground for those who want more power than a mini, but don’t want an all-in-one form factor like an iMac.

Looking at the initial hardware specs though, I have a difficult time seeing the basic low end model selling for anything less than $2500 (the current Mac Pro starts at $2499 for reference).  The current low end AMD FirePro (W5000) retails for around $430, the W7000 for around $700, the W8000 for $1400, while the high end (W9000) costs around $3200.  The Mac Pro will have two of these; obviously, the actual cost to Apple is far less than retail (this is just meant to provide a ballpark figure just for the video graphics).  As for the actual processor, it looks like this will be only a single socket system (current Mac Pro has both single and dual socket configurations).

Apple’s high end systems also tend to command high margins so I expect the lowest end system (which will likely ship with a 4-core Xeon, minimum of 8GB of RAM and 128GB of flash storage to come in at around the $2999 mark).  I’d be surprised if they can come in at the current starting price point.  There is a particular price point just below the current starting $2499 mark though where the issues with the lack of internal expansion will make this thing sell in far larger numbers (especially to the prosumer demographic).  Personally, I don’t expect this to happen though as this system will likely also be introduced with a new 4K Thunderbolt Cinema Display and be the only system in Apple’s lineup to initially handle that (I don’t see a Retina version of the iMac until mid-2014 at the earliest because the issue will again be manufacturing and getting the costs down).

On top of the new system, customers are going to have to purchase external Thunderbolt enclosures for their current drives.  The economies of scale with Thunderbolt accessories is a chicken and egg issue.  If a sizable number of customers buy into this new form factor, the peripherals will begin selling in larger numbers, leading to that eventual drop in prices which will make the cost of external expansion, far more palatable for those not on the extreme end of the “professional” user market.

One interesting thing is that based on the following graphic, the new Mac Pro could actually fit (with some internal modification) inside the case of what will soon be the legacy model.  I can see a niche for modders or even a company to come out with solutions where one can use a partially internally gutted Mac Pro case to continue housing cards (potentially more of them) and hard drives (also more of them) with the internals normally part of an external Thunderbolt chassis, as part of a kit that is installed inside of a partially gutted Mac Pro (thus I can see older Mac Pro’s maintaining their value for many reasons since folks like myself will be looking to buy even dead ones just for the case).

When I first saw the cylindrical case, my first thought went back to the Cray supercomputer (image below).

An interesting idea for external Thunderbolt expansion that would complement the Mac Pro’s cylindrical design is a round stackable aluminum base similar to like the bottom of a Cray (which housed it’s power supply and cooling system).  The Mac Pro could sit on top of this; the base could act as part drive enclosure (3 drives in a smaller footprint triangle formation or 4 drives in a slightly larger plus layout) and cabling management (I’m too lazy to CAD this out).

What will be interesting is whether or not the current core demographic of Mac Pro customers will accept or reject Apple’s offering.  For myself, I’m undecided because there is still much that is not known when it comes to specs and pricing.  As someone who bought a G4 Cube mainly for its design and aesthetic qualities as opposed to its performance when it first came out, I’m kind of looking at the new Mac Pro in that light based on the limited amount of current information. I guess we’ll see once an actual release date becomes known.