Apple has announced a new MacPro, is it time for the video professional to move to Windows?

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The wait is finally over and Apple has announced a new and more powerful MacPro, but is it really a replacement for the venerable MacPro tower that is out now. Personally I don’t think so, and this is why.

The Current MacPro is all about expandability and choice. You aren’t locked into much as you have 4 PCI slots, 4 drive bays, and 2 Optical Disc bays, so you can really expand within your machine, and can pick and chose the components you want to make the best machine for you.

The MacPro throws all that out of the window and makes a tiny little machine 9.9 inches tall and 6.6 inches wide, and only 1/8 the volume of the current MacPro is a bizarre little cylindrical tower, and it relies completely on external expandability and it’s 6 Thunderbolt 2 ports (each supposedly doing 20GB of throughput each). Inside is a single PCI 3 SSD for blazing fast speed, but all other drive space must be external, and at wity multiple monitors you will be using up at least one thunderbolt port.

For graphics it has dual AMD FirePro Workstation Class GPU’s with 6GB of VRAM each for some serious power, and can connect 3 4K displays, but you get no choice, AMD only, which is great FCP X and other programs that rely on Open GL and Open CL, but without an NVIDIA card, you get no CUDA support, which is how many top graphics programs get their insane acceleration. And most programs actually bog down with dual graphics, unless you are doing something like an NVIDIA Maximus configuration where you use a QUADRO for the graphics head and a TESLA for the rendering power, but personally I would rather go cheaper and have a new NVIDIA TITAN GTX which is basically a consumer version of the TESLA and is only a thousand, vs multiple GPU’s would should cost at least $2000 and not have CUDA support. And CUDA support rocks! Still AMD claims they are faster than CUDA.

And 20GB is fast, but not as fast as PCI. A 16x PCI bus is 64 GB of throughput, while a PCI 3 (which this Machine says it has at 40GB/s) in 16x is 128GB/s throughput. So yes you could buy a $500 expansion chassis and run a single PCI 2 4x which has a 16 GB throughput, but I would rather have that extra $500 put into my main case and be able to fit it all into one unit instead of having an octopus of cables and drives and expansion chassis connected to a new version of the Mac Cube (actually more like a Pro Mac Mini).

And then we come to the processor, which is a single XEON chip with up to an impressive 12 cores, but the real power of Xeon’s is dual processor, which could have 2 12 Core Xeon’s (though a 12 core Xeon is going to be insanely expensive, especially when you could get an 8 core [or possibly up to 12] i7 with hyperthreading for a whole lot less). If you aren’t going to have multiple processors, why not have the top of the line i7 instead, as on a mac you are not going to be overclocking.

And the rotating thing is weird, especially if all 16 connectors are full. And seriously no front USB ports? I use those all the time!

It will be a powerful machine, but it is dumbed down and not internally expandable. And will be mess if you expand everything externally. And you will have to live without CUDA, which I have grown to love with Premiere Pro and After Effects (yes Premiere will work with AMD, but so far at least CUDA has been faster).

The thing is I love Mac, but I would rather have a huge internal tower. And that means I could go Hackintosh, but they always have issues, especially with upgrades. The other option is going to Windows and getting your choice. You can get a custom build system from someone like Puget Systems (where you can get a pretty bad ass custome built dual xeon system for under $6000) or you can build your own and save money and have a more powerful machine with all the internal expansion you would ever need.

Right now I am leaning towards windows for my next machine, but it will be a while before I can afford a new system anyway, so maybe we shall see if this MacPro is good enough, but I just don’t know about giving up CUDA for a system that is more form than function!

New Cloud Storage service Cloud with 15 GB and if you sign up I get an additional 5 GB

Yet another new Cloud Storage service with 15 GB of free Space, and you get an additional 5 GB for each Referral. It is called Cloud and also has an iOS app and Mac Program, so it can be used on Mac or PC.

As for Pricing for $99 a year or $9.99 a month you get $250 GB of storage, or for $149 a year or $14.99 a month you get 500GB of storage.

Sure is a lot bigger than DropBox, so why don’t you check out Cloud, and give me 5 GB of additional storage.

Alex4D on the MacPro Successor, and my own speculation

Alex4D has some interesting speculation on what Tim Cook said was “Something really great” for Mac Pro users coming this year, which we all hope will be announced next week at the WWDC. He speculates that Apple could be allowing 3rd parties to build high end machines.

Honestly this is more of a wet dream for Mac Professionals than I think is what is going to happen. To have Apple create a high end specification and let 3rd parties build the pro hardware would be pretty awesome, especially with a license fee to Apple, and specced with only XEON’s so it doesn’t cannibalize Apple’s own hardware as it will guaranteed out price it. I just don’t see Apple going that route again, NO WAY NO HOW! Not that it wouldn’t be awesome, especially if it had to have certain things, like Thunderbolt, dual XEON’s and the like, but I don’t think Apple will ever do that again.

And the speculation of late of a machine with outboard hardware via thunderbolt for expansion just pushes me more towards my next machine being a windows machine. I don’t want to, but I need the best hardware and most expansion that i can get.

And my MacPro 4,1 is having problems. My Finder has gotten slow, really slow. I click to it and I get a beachball often. And yes I have re-installed the system, but I restored from the previous one, so obviously it is software that I have installed that is causing the issue, but I don’t have the time or energy to re-install everything from scratch right now (especially right now, since I am pulling 60-72 hour work weeks, damn I am tired).

And I am having issues with Mail of late, that I am stating to see popping up on forums. It is fixable, but keeps coming back.

And I am having sound issue. The sound out ports come and go, luckily I have an edirol with optical sound out, but that doesn’t seem to work with windows, so I am constantly moving my optical out cable, what a damn pain!

And yes I do have a PC NVIDIA GTX 670 installed in my Mac so I don’t see any startup screens, just black, but it also takes a while to boot. A minute or more, but when I boot into Windows 8 via bootcamp I am up and running in 30 seconds!

I think my machine is just getting old, and my 24GB of RAM is proving too little, though I do run a lot of crap.

Still if I could afford it (which I can’t) a new machine in the next year would be awesome, especially if we have a kid before too long, as I will likely have to try and do more work from home, and my current machine could use an upgrade.

Hmm. Let’s hope Apple releases something really great.