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!

Mac Performance on Apple’s iCloud being broken like I have been saying!

MacPerformance Guide has a great article on Apple’s iCloud being broken for him, just like it is broken for me!

I have been talking for some time about how my iCloud Bookmarks are completely messed up and I can’t fix them! There is no option to wipe out what is on the server, and my server bookmarks are screwed up! Now it may have something to do with me using X-Marks, but that is how I keep my bookmarks synced between Chrome, Firefox and Safari, but my Safari bookmarks constantly were screwing up the mix, so I had to turn off iCloud for bookmarks and just manually sync my bookmarks if I want them to end up on my iPhone and iPad.

I first posted about my problems on May 20th of 2012, and again on March of this year!

Apple Updates iMacs with Haswell Processors and NVIDIA 7 Series GPU’s

Apple has once again updated it’s iMacs, now with Haswell Processors, PCI SSD cards and NVIDIA 7 series GPU’s!. Now that the MacPro is going fully AMD only, people wanting CUDA will have iMacs as their main option, as you can go up to a GTX 780M with 4GB of GDDR5 Memory. Would rather have a non-mobile version of the processor, but these should still rock for CUDA.

If only APPLE would relent and release a MacPro that is actually expandable, and doesn’t use just thunderbolt for expansion, but that is unlikely to happen. Thinking a hackintosh looks more and more likely in my Future!

Oliver Peters on how FCP 7 makes a great companion to FCP X

Oliver Peters has an interesting article on how he uses Final Cut pro 7 as a companion to Final Cut Pro X to make up for it’s missing features.

Personally I see it as indictment of FCP X. As a program is pretty broken if you have to use an older EOL version of itself to support many high end features, especially when said program could not work on the next OS X Mavericks!

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!