Apple is selling the new Mac Pro, though it doesn’t ship till February!

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Yes you can finally order the new Mac Pro from Apple, but it doesn’t ship till February, which makes it really not available this year as promised. And it looks like Mac rumors was right on the pricing of the upgrades.

Annoying that even a mouse and keyboard are extra and it doesn’t even come with a thunderbolt cable! And with the 6 Core, 32 GB of memory, 1 TB of storage and the Dual AMD FirePro D700’s with 6GB of VRAM we are looking at $5799. Not a cheap system at all.

Still no MacPro release as of December 17th

Everyone was expecting today to be the day fro the release of the new MacPro as Apple usually does it on Tuesdays, but as of 7:50 AM at least, the site still shows the basic MacPro information, but no info on upgrade costs, as it is suspected that these machines will quickly go up in price.

MacRumors does have a list of suspected prices for the upgrades, but until Apple actually releases it is all estimation.

Looks like an added $600 to go up to the D700 with 6GB of RAM and $800 for a 1TB SSD and $400 to go up to 32 GB of RAM, which is about all I could afford, as $1500 for an 8 core and $3000 for a 12 core just seems insane.

Edit Geek on building a Hackintosh Mac Pro

Edit Geek has a good article on building your own Hackintosh MacPro to try and match the new MacPro’s apple will be releasing in December.

Still not the serious expansion I would want if I went through building a Mac Pro tower. For me it would have to be huge and I would consider Dual Xeons, though since all the new MacPro’s are not dual processor, maybe an i7 would be enough. Dual 6 Cores would be great though, as I could never afford a 12 core.

Apple to release new Mac Pro in December

Apple has finally given more info on the MacPro and it will be released sometime in December.

Still no word on customization prices, but the Quad-Core starts at $2999 and the Hexa Core starts at $3999 and can go up to a 12 core. And we have seen that the Graphics cards are either Dual AMD FirePro D300’s with 3GB of VRAM, dual AMD D500 with 3GB of VRAM or Dual AMD D700 with 65GB of VRAM, but no price on the D700. All include 256GB of PCIe SSD Flash Storage, but can be upgraded to 512 or 1 TB which will be necessary if you plan on installing Windows since it requires an internal install so look forward to a partition.

I still want my next computer to be Mac, but I really would prefer NVIDIA Titan cards for Graphics!

Mac Performance Guide on the 2013 MacPro

The Mac Performance Guide has a new article on the speed of the new MacPro and it is obvious that this person shares my sentiment on the new MacPro and what a mistake it is!

Losing 5 internal drive bays, losing relatively inexpensive memory exansion to 48GB or 64GB or 128GB, losing three PCIe slots, losing the internal optical drive, and adding the associated rat’s nest of pile of cables and boxes should give pause to anyone considering a Mac Pro.

and

Form before function might be one early warning sign of the long term decline of Apple. It’s not just the Mac Pro. All great companies eventually decline, victims of their own hubris sooner or later, and a failure to Serve their users. I see Apple on that path. The 2013 Mac Pro is just one manifestation which follows ill-conceived changes with no substantive improvements in OS X, and the stick in the eye to Final Cut Pro users which forced them away from Apple. And many other things that most won’t notice, but are like small lesions here and there.

Literally I am wondering if my next Tower will be a PC. I would like to consider a Hackintosh, but the lack of expansion in the new MacPro really makes me wonder if anyone will even keep making Mac drivers for PCI cards for the Mac. And it is not like I really like Windows 8. The Metro start screen is awful, but at least I can get expansion, upgradeability and NVIDIA graphics cards with CUDA support!

My biggest worry of building a Hackintosh

I have not been quiet about my disdain for the new MacPro. Having Thunderbolt instead of PCI is not a solution.

A single PCI slot at 1x is 8 Gbps, while Thunderbolt is 10 Gbps, and Thunderbolt 2 is 20 Gbps. So Thunderbolt 2 is slower than 3x PCI (24 Gbps vs 20 Gbps). Every MacPro since 2009 has had 2 x 4x PCI slots which are 32 Gbps and 2 x 16x which 128 Gbps (or so much faster than even the next gen 50 Gbps Thunderbolt). So Thunderbolt will never be fast enough for a 16x Graphics card!
And my bigger worry is that without PCI expansion why will anyone write drivers for PCI cards for Macs now that there will be no Macs with PCI cards!
I have been thinking my next Mac will be a custom built PC, as NVIDIA and CUDA are important to me and my work, but I want a Mac! So I was hoping to build a Hackintosh, a custom built PC hacked to run Mac software. You can make a Hackintosh more powerful than the new MacPro (not cheaply as Decent 6x Xeons run around $1400 each, so almost $3000 for 2) and have huge amounts of expansion, but without future PCI drivers it won’t last! Maybe drivers will still work, as they will need to write Thunderbolt drivers which should still go through the PCI bus, but who knows. And why will NVIDIA keep writing universal graphics drivers like they have been doing?
So does that mean a PC is in my future? Maybe. Maybe a Mac laptop and a PC for editing and graphics work? That seems expensive! Of course so does giving up a Mac with all the software I have bought over the years.
Honest I just don’t know! No solution seems cheap, or to really fulfill my needs like a new MacPro with expansion like the current MacPro would have been.
If I had unlimited funds I would probably just move to PC and get a Wacom Tablet to replace my iPad. And replace all my software, and maybe a Retina MacPro laptop, or maybe a Razer gaming laptop. I just don’t know!

Is this the deathnell for the new Apple MacPro

Arstechnica is reporting that Acer one of the leaders in Thunderbolt is dropping it for at least the next year. The entire new MacPro is dependent on Thunderbolt to act as it’s expansion, since it has no user addable PCI slots. So you must use expensive Thunderbolt expansion to add accessories to your new Cylinder MacPro. The thing is that so far Thunderbolt support is pretty underwelming. There are some good raid enclosures, but almost nothing for just hard drive housings for your old drives, and everything else is very expensive. In fact there are very few PC motherboards with Thunderbolt, and none with support for Dual Xeons, so it is very very niche!

Everyone is betting on USB 3, which is almost as fast (and plans on getting even faster, and has backwards compatibility), which every PC has, and yes the MacPro has a few ports, but not enough.

And Thunderbolt is not really a PCI replacement. It is fast, but not nearly as fast as PCI, so you can’t say put an external NVIDIA video card for CUDA support. It would just be too slow.

And without PC support it will always be a very Niche product.

Makes me think if I want to stay with Mac I will have to do a Hackintosh, which are notoriously unstable, but could at least run windows easily, and have everything I want internally instead of in a spiderweb of external expensive thunderbolt peripherals!

I don’t want to have to move fully to windows, but even now I am running bootcamp. And Windows 8 boots faster on my Mac than Mac OS X, and I can build a PC with almost all the expansion I want within a single case with a single power cord. I mean I already have such a serious snake of power cable is am surprised it doesn’t trip the fuse more often!

OS X Issues, Quicktime died but I fixed it, but Finder is still slow

Been having some serious OS X issues of late.

First quicklook died in my finder. Couldn’t see any quicktime movies, and I realized also could not open then in Quicktime, quicktime was basically dead. I tried booting as Root and the issue persisted so I realized it was not my user file, and was something with my system. The problem also persisted in Safe Mode, so it had to be a system issue.

Since my last major issue was a major system fault, I currently have a spare 2 GB hard drive, so I installed OS X on it and moved my user over to it using migration assistant to see if the problem persisted. Twice when I did it the computer froze. It was on, but all USB devices were unpowered, and pulling them and plugging them back in didn’t help, and the monitor was black. So I re-installed OS X a second time, and then started it before migrating my old user, and turned off sleep and it migrated fine. And that system worked fine, quicktime was good and everything was there. Since everything had moved over OK, and I now had a backup (beyond my Time Machine), I decided to try re-installing OS X over the old one using my new 10.8.4 recovery partition, and after that OS X booted fine (well a few things are weird, like Sugar Sync, X-marks and it seems Java is now gone for CrashPlan).

After the install my computer boot much faster. I have a PC NVIDIA GTX 670 for my graphics card, so it doesn’t show the mac startup screens until it goes gray and the desktop appears, and it was taking a good minute to boot, but now it boots in under 30 seconds, so that is great. And Quicktime now works fine, as does quicklook. No idea what happened to cause it, it just happened.

And I have already run Diskwarrior and TechTool as well as ClamXav, so I have no issues with drives or viruses. No idea what tanked my quicktime.

The one issue I have been having that persists is a slow finder. For the last 6 months or so my finder has been very slow and gets the beachball of slowness all the time. I mean all the time, and I have not been able to fix the issue, no matter what I do.

I have been trying to clean out my user to see if that is it, and have been using CleanMyMac 2, and manually cleaning as well. Nothing has helped the finder issue so far.

I even found this Apple Support forum thread, where they tell you to try this terminal command to see what is installed as finder extension. “kextstat -kl | awk ‘ !/apple/ { print $6 } ‘”

For results I get:

com.microsoft.driver.MicrosoftKeyboard
com.microsoft.driver.MicrosoftKeyboardUSB
 
For my Microsoft Ergo Keyboard
 
jp.plentycom.driver.SteerMouse
 
For my Trackball
 
com.razer.common.razerhid
 
For my Razer gaming keyboard
 
com.sonnettech.driver.SonnetSATA
 
for my Sonnet Tempo SATA E4P PCIe via which I run my SATA drives for editing
 
com.SafeNet.driver.Sentinel
 
How I run Lightwave 3D
 
com.makemkv.kext.daspi
 
For makemkv
 
com.AmbrosiaSW.AudioSupport
 
I am removing this WireTap Studio KEXT to see if that helps
 
com.nvidia.CUDA
 
For my Geforce GTX 670
 
If anyone has any ideas on how to speed my finder back up without having to re-install everything on a clean OS X install I would greatly appreciate any help!