My faith in Apple mostly restored with the new Mac Pro!

So Apple officially showed off the new MacPro at the WWDC, and it is pretty F***ING AWESOME!!!!

First off it looks like a Cheese-grater, which was literally to please the fans of the old Cheese-grater!

And it has handles, and you can even get wheels. And the metal case comes off so you can access it from all sides.

It has 8, 12, 16, 24 or 28 core Xeon processors, getting 300 kw of power so they never get throttled, with a special air cooled system.

It has 12 RAM slots capable of 1.5 Terrabytes of RAM (I can’t wait to laugh at the price of that from Apple).

And it has 8  PCI SLOTS! Well, 7 really, but DAMN! 4 double wide slots for graphics cards (both with an additional new PCI connector for the MPX modules) with 1 x16 and 2 x8 gen 3 for video cards. And the top slot is a half wife slot for Apple’s I/O card (which means it can be upgraded or changed out).

And the MPX Modules are special PCI graphics cards in containers. There is a half heigh one fro the AMD Radeon Pro 580x which comes standard. And then full size modules that fill 2 double wide PCI slots, for either the AMD Radeon Pro Vega II with 32 GB of Memory, or the AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo which is 2 cards in one with super fast connection between the cards (and you can install 2 of these! Wow that will cost a ton). And these all have extra thunderbolt ports (as there are 2 on top and 2 on the I/O card). And these can get 300 wats of power

The system has an unbelievable 1.4 kilowatts of power supply!

And my favorite addition, the Afterburner ProRES and ProRES RAW Accelerator PCI Card which can play 3 streams of 8K ProRes RAW or 12 streams of 4K ProRes Raw without touching the CPU or GPU! WOW! They said you can do realitime color correction and effects on DaVinci in 8K in realtime! My question is will it be supported via thunderbolt 3 for the iMacPro maybe along with a video card like the BlackMagic kit they support? And it would be even better if it also supported BlackMagic RAW!

And up to a 4GB SSD.

And there is also a rack mounted version!

WOW! This is a powerhouse, and the 6K monitor would make an amazing, though expensive addition!

My only complaints are AMD only, no NVIDIA. And sure NVIDIA wouldn’t let them do these MPX modules with Thunderbolt, nor support those new fangled PCI slots that allow them, but 4 NVIDIA cards in here would be screaming! And the 4GB SSD. I know people don’t like spinning platters anymore, but man I have so much stuff on drives now, 4GB which will be insanely expensive is just not enough storage! Hell I could only afford 2GB in my iMac Pro! I was hoping for some sort of built in raid when you could put in your own hard drives, but that was alas just a ridiculous dream.

The Apple Music App replacing iTunes had better still support Star Ratings!

So it is official, as rumored iTunes is dead, and split into 3 apps (well 4, as syncing is going to be built into the finder).

There is Music, Podcasts and TV.

The thing that scares me is that Apple has already pulled Star ratings from the iOS apps, and replaced it with like and dislike. So does this mean that all ratings are going to go away?

I have been rating my music since iTunes began, and before in fact when it was SoundJam MP.

And honestly I don’t want to lose the granularity of 5 star ratings, but if I have to someone at Doug’s Scripts had better write a script that allows you chose a rating or above to move it to a like, so I can at least recreate my smart playlists with likes.

Is the apple Afterburner ProRes Video Accelerator card for MacPro going to be available via expansion chassis for iMacPro?

OK so I just got an iMac Pro as my MacPro 4,1 finally fried. And I needed a machine, and just didn’t want to move to windows, so I went iMac Pro.

And I figured I could always add an external video card via thunderbolt if I need to make the system faster, but that new MacPro gave me an idea.

After all it has a PCI card that speeds up ProRES video rendering. Sure it might not be as fast via Thunderbolt 3, but an expansion chasis with a second video card and that ProRES card would be F•••ing AMAZING!!

Come on Apple! Think about it!

Sidecard for MacOS Catalina has to have Wacom scared as all hell!

This has been rumored, but to see it in action, wow. So with Mac OS Catalina, you can use a feature called sidecar, and have your iPad extend your Mac Screen and use the Apple Pencil. Goodbye Wacom tablet, you can now use the Apple Pencil and iPad to draw right on images!

Wow, I really can’t wait for this! This is a game changer for Photoshop!

And Apple’s 6K Retina Display, the ProDisplay XDR, with a cheesegrater back! Wow!

The new 6K Apple Retina Display is insane looking, and having the cheesegrater on the back in a nice touch. HOLY SHIT!

1000 nits of brightness and 1,000,000 to 1 contrast ratio! XDR, ProDisplay XDR!

And Rotation for Portrait mode! WOW!

Again, going to cost a mint!

Yup $4999, a fucking mint, and $5999 for the higher end one!

OK the new Apple MacPro is insane!!! And it looks like a Cheesegrater!

OK, so HOLY SHIT!

The new MacPro looks like a Cheesegrater, and while it doesn’t support NVIDIA, it looks powerful as shit. Room for 4 32 GB Video Cards, and a Video Processor card! And up to 1.5 Terrabytes  RAM! And over a gigahert of power! FUCK ME!

And realtime 8K color correction with FX in DaVinci! WOW!!!!

And it looks like a cheesegrater! And a rack mounted version!

This thing looks amazing, though is literally going to cost a mint!

OK Starting at $5999 is not a bad actually!

And I just got an iMacPro as my old MacPro finally died, so won’t be getting one any time soon, but OMG!

The Week Magazine is back on Apple News+ but I can’t access it

So The Week is back on Apple News+, though I can’t access it. And it isn’t in the News+ section, neither under The Week or Week. It does seem to be available, from it’s liked section in News, but I can’t access the issues.

I can’t download any of the available issues though. When I try to I get this message:

Frustrating, as this Magazine was my number one reason for subscribing to News+.

Apple News+ has lost half it’s magazines in one month!

So I was excited for Apple’s News+ magazine service and signed up for the free month after doing the math on my current subscriptions, and the $9.95 Apple News Plus. It was released on March 25th, and it is April 25th, and already it seems the service is already losing magazines! AND I DON’T SEE THIS REPORTED ANYWHERE ELSE! My biggest selling point was The Week magazine, which I have read for years, but as of now, The Week is no longer available!

In fact when I look at the lost today it seems there are only 109 magazines, though that is not including the couple of newspapers that show up differently, but is far short of the release list that MacStories put out that shows 251 magazines! In fact the magazines that used to be split into 2 pages are all on one page now in the app!

And the service while cool, does have issues. The Apple news app always opens to the news portion and you have to select news+ which is very slow to load. And after selecting to download the magazines I want to read only a select few show up in the My Magazines section. Shouldn’t all the ones I chose show up? Why should I have to go back to the full list to find the magazines I already chose to download? And what about notifications? I get tons of news notifications, but not a single one for when magazines show up! I just have to keep looking to see. This is not user friendly at all.

And why does my phone have different magazines than my ipad? Why is the xbox magazine on my phone, but not my ipad, honestly WTF!

In one month half the magazines are gone, and the news+ should have it’s own dedicated app with notifications of new issues, or this service just isn’t worth the cost! Especially if it is going to keep losing magazines at this rate!