So Y.M. Cinema Magazine has a supposed leak of an internal slide showing info on the new modular MacPro 7,1. And not only is it powerful, but it has 3 pci slots, thunderbolt 4, and NVIDIA support! If this is true, holy shit!
I will be sad no matter what since my 4,1 passed and I now have an iMac Pro, but this bodes very well if it is true.
So a YouTube Channel called Tailosive Tech has released a video on an inside source from apple on the new 2019 macpro.
And AppleInsider has also covered it (easier to read, especially since the edit is very trimmed, but not very covered and hurts my brain a bit as an editor).
Not only does this cover the new rumored 6K 31 inch monitor, but the new macpro, claiming the modular mac works like stackable legos, with a brain module with a soldered in cpu, and 8 slots of upgradeable RAM. Then you can add GPU modules, and storage modules, possibly modules with the unanounced thunderbolt 4, and eventually possibly third party modules eventually. Each module with it’s own power supply and cooling. And possibly not available until 2020.
This would seem to cover “modular” and why it has taken so long. Giving people an upgraded cheesgrater would not have taken this long, but Apple wouldn’t have made money off every upgrade in that scenario, while with this stackable design they would, including third party modules from licensing their propriety connector. And upgrades likely won’t be cheap. Instead of just a gpu, you are also getting a case, the custom connector a power supply and cooling system (and likely a reason for dropping NVIDIA support, as NVIDIA doesn’t like customized boxes and shapes, but AMD is all in with that).
And depending on the modules, this could be a very cool machine, though also very very expensive. Lets hope they have sone SATA modules as large ammounts of SSD storage are still prohibitively expensive. And let’s hope third party support comes quickly as a blackmagicdesign module for video i/o would be essential. And a sledless 4 drive sata raid module wouldn’t be a bad thing either.
I know this is all rumor, but it makes total sense. This lets Apple give expandability, but lets them control it completely and make money off of every bit of it. And Apple will have delivered what they said, and can charge what they want for it. It will not make everyone happy, especially since it will not be easily user upgradeable, and will be significantly more expensive than a machine that is user upgradeable, but it will ge a true pro machine.
I just hope they show it off at WWDC on June 3rd, but if they aren’t releasing until at least December 31st 2019, that may be way too early.
MacNN has heard that the MacPro may in fact have upgradeable video cards. The Rub is that it is a proprietary connector and shape needed, so the card would have to be specifically designed for it, and it is unlikely that say NVIDIA would do that.
Electronista has a rumor that it may happen this month, though I am not holding my breath. I am betting on the WWDC, whenever that is. And I am also betting it won’t be as much as we want in a replacement.
Appleinsider has heard rumors of Apple working on 2 GB SSD’s for the new MacPro with a standard SATA connector.
And while that would be awesome, at least for a boot drive, the cost would be so prohibitively expensive that it would be useless! And the fusion drives scare me as if one drive goes you lose everything (though you should be backing it up anyway). Still the most hopefully thing out of this is that maybe we will be getting a new MacPro soon. I SURE HOP SO!!!
Macgasm is reporting that Intel Xeon e5 Chips are in the wild, these are also known as Sandy Bridge E and would power a next generation MacPro.
I really do hope this is true, as we need a new MacPro tower, and Apple needs to not give up in the Pro market, but make a new MacPro that also has a kick ass NVIDIA card with CUDA as it’s option and really stop the speculation about Apple leaving the pro market all together.
Macnn is reporting on the latest set of rumors on a new MacPro, and lets hope it is true, and Apple is staying committed to the pro market in at least it’s hardware.
They would be powered by the new Ivy Bridge 22 nanometer Xeon processors which can have 8 cores and 20MB cache, making for 16 core machines, with 32 virtual machines. And even more exciting to me is the possibility of returning to NVIDIA and their soon to released Kelper hardware. This would mean CUDA acceleration in Adobe Premiere, and hopefully the next generation Quadros being released for the mac. This could mean that Jobs fued with NVIDIA is over. Wouldn’t that rock!