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The Mac Pro Review

M4v3R 13y ago
AnandTech hardware and Ars Technica's software (especially OS X) reviews are works of art by themselves. The level of details that goes into these pieces is nothing short of amazing. They are examples of tech journaling done right.
- leephillips 13y ago
  AnandTech is often the only place that measures and reports anything about the screens of computers, tablets, and phones aside from how many pixels they have (color space, color accuracy, etc.). For this alone they are gold.
  - yapcguy 13y ago
    I like Anandtech but they have come into criticism recently, from some of their long-time readers, for fawning over Apple products.
    - gareim 13y ago
      Well that's silly. "Anandtech does great reviews unless it's favorable to something I'm not, so then those reviews must be biased". Either you trust Anandtech or you don't. And if you do, then you shouldn't call the reviews that go against your views as biased. By "you", I don't mean you, yapcguy. Just in general towards those that are criticizing Anandtech.
    - Watabou 13y ago
      It looks like your dislike of Apple somehow means that Anandtech is the one who is biased? Really? Come on now.
      - Cookingboy 13y ago
        He wasn't speaking for himself, he was talking about some of their readers.
        sbuk 13y ago
        Reading his other comment, he's talking for himself.
        revscat 13y ago
        Readers who are complained about far more often than they are actually seen.
        freshyill 13y ago
        "Some say…" is the Fox News way of saying "we just made this up on the show that preceded this one". Unless someone can actually call their conclusions and numbers into question using actual facts, then it's just anti-Apple whining, whether it's him or "some readers".
      - yapcguy 13y ago
        Look, it's not just me sitting here complaining. http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2270612 http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2270612 Pretty much every review of Apple gear has people moaning about bias in the comments. I'm not saying there is any favoritism, but certainly the perception amongst Anandtech readers is that there might be. At the end of the day, there's no reason why the writers at Anandtech would be any more immune to access journalism than other folk who have tried and failed.
        gress 13y ago
        Those kinds of complaints can be seen anywhere there is a positive review of Apple products. You are actually saying there is favoritism. It's dishonest to claim otherwise. You've just suggested that Anand has succumbed to access journalism. Why not just be honest about what you think, rather pretending to be disinterested reporting on the views of others? Let's also note that the commenter accusing AnandTech of bias in that comment thread you linked is resoundingly and overwhelmingly rebutted by other readers.
    - Cookingboy 13y ago
      That's just them being silly, since Apple actually do make fantastic products and care more than the superficial marketing specs wars (GHz race, number of cores race, megapixel race, screen size race, etc).
    - makomk 13y ago
      I can see why. They've been quite selective in what they compare the Mac Pro to in this review, for instance, because otherwise it wouldn't have come out so well. When they're arguing that it doesn't need expandability, they compare it to laptops and desktops that aren't expandable. Yet when it comes time to justify the pricing, they exclusively compare it to workstations that are aimed at a completely different market to desktops or laptops and have far more expansion options because that market expects them. If they compared the pricing to desktops and laptops or the expansion options to workstations, the Mac Pro would look a lot worse.
      - glasshead969 13y ago
        I feel like he addresses the new design as a risk which he thinks something that should be taken. If that's something target market doesn't appreciate,then ultimately this will be a failed product. But Mac Pro is targeted towards a different audience than a HP workstation. Its targeted towards Hollywood and Animation community where there is a lot of Thunderbolt penetration.
      - MBCook 13y ago
        I didn't see a big problem with it. They compared it's price to a few workstations to show that the price isn't unreasonable for similar hardware (i.e. Apple isn't adding a $1200 workstation tax). For the rest of the review they compared it to other Macs, because chances are that's what buyers are going to compare it with. If you want a Mac, those are your choices. I really doubt too many people who are in the market for an HP or Dell workstation are going to consider a Mac Pro. Plus there is the problem of benchmarks. The OS can make a big difference, so you'd either have to run every benchmark twice on each system (once on OS X, once on Windows or Linux), and then the non-Macs can't run OS X. It would be a ton of extra work, but I'm not sure how much gain it would give. Again, I think the number of workstation shoppers who will consider this machine is small. I expect the vast majority of it's sales will be to Mac users who want something more powerful than an iMac or a MacBook Pro.
        morganherlocker 13y ago
        > I really doubt too many people who are in the market for an HP or Dell workstation are going to consider a Mac Pro Especially with the gap in Mac Pro releases over the past few years, I have seen many people deciding between Mac Pro and a custom built hackintosh. For the stuff that really justifies a Mac Pro, these were the only two options for some time (short of moving off of an OSX stack). Sure, someone custom building a multi thousand dollar work station is not your typical consumer, but neither is your typical buyer of a spec'd out Mac Pro.
    - caycep 13y ago
      I always attributed this to the anti-Apple-ism of the "enthusiast" crowd that like their machines big, over clocked, and running hot. Anandtech fawns over a lot of products, but I suspect perhaps this is due to them reviewing products they are interested in, and not wasting time on stuff they aren't. I'd start to worry if people can't reproduce their lab numbers but at the moment, they're considered the most detailed and accurate of the lot.
    - coldtea 13y ago
      >I like Anandtech but they have come into criticism recently, from some of their long-time readers, for fawning over Apple products. Which, instantly, should be reason enough to understand that said criticism is BS. Apple products are among the best in the industry, period. Not just from the industrial design part of it, but overall: coherence of product vision, attention to important characteristics for the target market (battery time, portability, weight), quality machining and materials, attention to small details (from multitouch touchpad to magsafe adaptor and from backlit keyboard to magnetic, non protruding, lid hinge). These people think that because they are not speced and designed like gaming PCs they are not worthy ("I can have a better GPU for less money in my custom box, and with xeon lights on the sides too). And they attribute their popularity to some BS "reality distortion" effect, ignoring the fact that hardcore hackers, prominent programmers and old school neckerbeards, from Rob Pike, DHH, and Duncan Davidson to Jamie Jawinsky and Miguel De Icaza (the frigging founder of the Gnome desktop) down to Linus Torvalds, who waxes poetically about his MacBook Air as the best in the market. So, "fawning over Apple" justs translates to "did some favorable reviews of products, instead of making up BS reasons to dislike them".
      - yapcguy 13y ago
        Rob Pike wrote a blog post "Thank you Apple" (sarcasm) because of the problems he was having with his iMac and Apple's software. http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/09/thank-you-apple.html http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/09/thank-you-apple.ht... Linus Torvalds is said to be using the ChromeBook Pixel as his primary machine. http://www.geek.com/chips/linus-torvalds-is-making-the-chromebook-pixel-his-primary-laptop-1541940/ http://www.geek.com/chips/linus-torvalds-is-making-the-chrom... As for Miguel De Icaza, he's eating his own dog food, as he now makes his money selling an IDE for iOS development, so of course he's going to choose the Mac because that's where the toolchain is.
        leephillips 13y ago
        From now on when people ask me why I use Linux instead of OSX and why I refuse to install closed-source, copy-protected software, I'm going to send them to Rob Pike's eloquent description of his self-inflicted torture.
    - Tloewald 13y ago
      It's funny how most PC review sites get into trouble for allegedly fawning over apple hardware once they start reviewing it regularly. I wonder why that might be?
  - deviltry 13y ago
    Their game reviews are not that great when their long game reviewer left and replacement was brought.
  - tanzam75 13y ago
    > AnandTech is often the only place that measures and reports anything about the screens of computers, tablets, and phones aside from how many pixels they have (color space, color accuracy, etc.). For this alone they are gold. Not the only place. I have found the German site NotebookCheck.net to be more thorough than Anandtech when it comes to laptop reviews. Not only do they measure color space and color accuracy, but they also measure backlighting levels across the screen, comment on backlight bleed, test for viewing angles, check the reflectiveness of screens, etc. In addition, they also test decibel levels of the fan, temperature of the laptop surface, etc. at various loads. They point out situations where a certain laptop may ship in two configurations. They point out the pros/cons of the nearest products from competing vendors, which have also been tested with equal thoroughness. In other words, they actually test the machines against a checklist, to assess the performance of each element. In contrast, when an Anandtech reviewer claims that a machine is quiet or that the screen is matte, you don't actually get all the information. Maybe the ventilation system was masking some of the sound. Maybe the screen is only semi-matte. The only problem is that NotebookCheck is based in Germany, so some of the machines they review are not available in the United States. Still, I'm happy restricting my choices a bit to avoid being surprised with a laptop purchase.
    - leephillips 13y ago
      This sounds like an excellent site, thanks for the tip.
- davidy123 13y ago
  Really? It's the same format that's been around since the earliest days of Web reviews. Newer sites are moving on to data allowing comparisons between anything (storagereview was an early leader in that). Although it's not quite as pathetic as sites that post screen captures of benchmark programs, I find sites like anandtech are like quaint bedtime stories in comparison.
- epsylon 13y ago
  I know people on HN enjoy being hyperbolic, but I certainly wouldn't call a piece of tech journalism art.
PythonDeveloper 13y ago
Nonetheless, STOP spamming your site on HackerNews
thirdsight 13y ago
I'm glad they mention the HP Z420. The killer for me on the Z420: three-year Mon-Fri 8-5 next business day, parts, labor and 24x7 phone support, They come to me. Edit: to all the naysayers: I'm in the UK. HP here is pretty good. We have over 200 machines on next day and we've had only two (!) problems and they were relating to part supply resulting in a quick purchase on Misco that arrived next day.
- codex 13y ago
  In most locations you can get 4-hour support by buying AppleCare Premium.
  - thirdsight 13y ago
    Not in Europe which means that isn't most locations!
- x0x0 13y ago
  Hi. I'm a hp warranty victim; an so's old laptop had 3 year next business day support. On three occasions those lying sacks of shit made us mail it to them for a week at a time. Don't believe it; your "next day" warranty is just a donation of beer money for hp execs.
  - Moto7451 13y ago
    When I worked at a pharmacy doing IT work, they purchased some desktops from HP with a multi year on site support deal. One day we had a computer's Hard Drive die so we called them up to fix it, which they did... and nothing more. I asked them about putting Windows back on it (as the restore partition was nowhere to be found) and the guy said "not our department." I ended up torrenting an HP restore ISO and thankfully the BIOS's licensing key matched the ISO.
- marincounty 13y ago
  Yea--I spent an embarrassing amout of time trying to fix a HP laptop. The Nvidia chip didn't touch the cooling bar--I think--long time ago. Customers eventually won a lawsuit, but I wasen't notified? HP really need to clean up their image. If any Sonoma State Grads read this--forward to the next CEO.
thearn4 13y ago
Do a lot of folks here generally like Mac desktops? I've grown to like Macbooks because I do like working on a portable UNIX-y platform, and have had generally bad luck with Linux laptops in the past. On desktops though, I'm willing to put more effort into settling software update issues/device conflicts, since I probably have to do that anyway to write performance-optimized code (depends on the exact purpose of the desktop though, but I do a lot of scientific computing). So a Linux/Windows split boot on a generic PC usually wins out. I used to do a lot of PC gaming, but that's really less of a factor now.
- e40 13y ago
  After running every version of Windows since 3.1, I've decided to go Mac for my desktop. I run stuff on it 24/7 and have 6 external disks, so a MBP is out of the question. The cost of external enclosures, though, for the new Mac Pro makes it out of reach ($3000 + $2400 = $5400... I can put together a nice hackintosh for $1700).
  - melvinram 13y ago
    The DIY PC route is still going to be more affordable. If we go the Ivy Bridge E route and opt for a Core i7-4930K, you get more cores than either of the options above for around $600 for the CPU. Adding in another $330 for a motherboard, $180 for 12GB of DDR3-1866 memory, $1400 for two W7000 GPUs and $220 for a fast SATA SSD (Samsung 840 Pro) we’re at $2730 for a configuration that would cost at least $3499 from Apple. That’s excluding case, PSU and OS, but adding another ~$350 takes care of that and still saves you some money. As the AnandTech review points out, you're looking at $2700ish if you opt for hardware that is apples to apples comparison... regardless of whether you went with hackintosh, Linux, or Windows.
    - revelation 13y ago
      Only because of the workstation GPUs. You can get better performance for much less if you don't need the special labeling.
songgao 13y ago
Does anybody know how much work is required to run Linux on this thing? I read some documents but found them complicated enough that I don't want to deal with on my daily computer. Also there seems to be driver problem related to thermal issues. So I ended up with virtual machines every time considering installing Linux on Mac. Anybody running Linux on Macbooks or Mac Pro? Does it work well?
- lemonberry 13y ago
  I think Linus runs linux on a Macbook Air. Techcrunch interview here: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/19/an-interview-with-millenium-technology-prize-finalist-linus-torvalds/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/19/an-interview-with-millenium... *edited to add link
  - codemac 13y ago
    He's on a chromebook pixel these days.
  - green7ea 13y ago
    He switched to a chromebook pixel recently: https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/dk1aiW4JjHd https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/dk1aiW4JjHd
- PhineasRex 13y ago
  I run Linux on a Macbook Pro (late 2013). It works remarkably well considering this hardware came out a few months ago. The only thing that doesn't work are the Thunderbolt ports (they work for everything except monitors, which crashes the machine after ~10 minutes).
guelo 13y ago
Wow. For me, the big takeaway from this review are the benchmarks showing the iMac and MBPs beating out the Mac Pro. That shows that this machine is really for niche markets like professional video editing. Makes you wonder why Apple even bothers.
- icegreentea 13y ago
  In general, the MacPro loses out in single-thread performance only, since Xeons are typically one architecture behind. When the Haswell based Xeons come out, Apple will refresh the Mac Pro line, and you'll get parity single-thread performance.
  - seabrookmx 13y ago
    Do we know that though? Historically speaking, the Mac Pro doesn't get updated nearly as often as Intel releases a new architecture.
    - rsynnott 13y ago
      It actually did for a long time; then they skipped a few iterations. Maybe they'll do that again, maybe they won't; we'll see.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    What are the odds the Haswell Xeons will use the same socket as the current Xeons?
    - wmf 13y ago
      Zero since Haswell-EP uses DDR4.
      - duskwuff 13y ago
        That being said, I wonder what the chances are that Apple will use the same socket for the Haswell-EP CPU daughterboard. Is there anything obvious that'd prevent them from doing that (e.g, chipset compatibility)?
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
marincounty 13y ago
Apple needs to fix Mavericks before I ever buy anything from them. They have so much cash, and so many bugs in Mavericks?
- yapcguy 13y ago
  iOS is insecure, Mavericks buggy as hell, iCloud can't keep the lights on. One has to wonder what all their engineers are actually working on.
  - gress 13y ago
    How is iOS insecure?
    - Watabou 13y ago
      I would ignore him. He clearly has no idea what he's saying. No one I've talked to has called Mavericks "buggy as hell".
      - protomyth 13y ago
        I would say at least the Finder in Mavericks is "buggy as hell"[1]. It looks like it has a real issue with preview images (when the file is dragged to another window), Applescript, and updating based on file system changes. 1) my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6993850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6993850
      - corresation 13y ago
        Mavericks is absolutely a regression. My Mac Mini i7 (2013), for instance, will regularly recover from sleep with a black screen. Now if you are careful you can log in (hope the context is in the password box, type your password and return), but this has been there since Mavericks release. Many people have reported it. Still there. It is among a long list of bizarre oddities and system quirks that simply didn't happen pre-Mavericks.
    - deleted 13y ago
at-fates-hands 13y ago
Interesting they compared the new Mac to a workstation. Older workstations these days are a lot more affordable and can easily be upgraded. Most MACS you're stuck with what you get. Case in point, I just purchased an HP 8400 workstation for a friend. $320 for a dual proc 2.6GHz quad core Xeon, 16GB RAM, Two 320GB SAS drives in RAID config and ATI Fire V7350 1GB video card. Sure its a pig and isn't the quietest PC in the room, but it completely shreds anything I could find in a retail setting.
- Cookingboy 13y ago
  Really? $320 for a new machine with that spec? That graphics card alone costed more than that when it was new, did the CPU/storage/power supply come at negative price? If this was true, it would really explain HP's financial situation /s EDIT: that graphics card despite being old, still sells for $300 on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/ATI-100-505143-FireGL-512-bit-Express/dp/B000EWEPB4 http://www.amazon.com/ATI-100-505143-FireGL-512-bit-Express/...
  - LukeShu 13y ago
    Read closer. He "just" recently paid that. The HP 8400 is what, a 2007 machine? The prices when the parts were new is irrelevant.
    - Cookingboy 13y ago
      I suspected as much, but then it's silly to bring it into a cost/performance comparison against a brand new top of the line 2013 desktop. Yes they are upgradable, but by the time you upgrade them to modern spec it will cost a lot more than $320.
- mwfunk 13y ago
  "MACS"?
  - mortenjorck 13y ago
    Writing "Mac" in all caps as if the writer obtusely believes it to be an acronym for something is part of the style manual for passive-aggressive platform debate.
bfrog 13y ago
A 1 year warranty is such a joke for this much money. I think this and the new mbp where should anything break you need a full replacement basically, need to have some serious warranty coverage changes. 3 years minimum in my mind. Just another way to nickle and dime you on something like an almost required extended warranty. Apple, your stuff is mostly nice. Fix your product warranty and maybe I'll open my wallet.
- umsm 13y ago
  Isn't it worth it to purchase the Applecare warranty for $250 which extends the warranty period to 3 years? When you're spending $3k on a computer, I don't see how $250 will really affect the bottom line...
  - bane 13y ago
    When the customer is spending north of $3k on a computer, why not toss in the warranty for free?
    - Watabou 13y ago
      When you see the price of the dual GPUs, the ECC RAM, PCIe SSD, and the small design, you will see why they didn't toss in the warranty for free. You do get 1 year free warranty though and that's something. It's only $249 for the extra two years which is worth it in my opinion.
      - leoc 13y ago
        ECC isn't that much more expensive, while AFAIK the price premium for pro-model GPUs is almost pure price-gouging, and Apple's surely not paying those inflated prices for the GPUs.
  - 6d0debc071 13y ago
    > Isn't it worth it to purchase the Applecare warranty for $250 which extends the warranty period to 3 years? payoff * Probability of payoff = EV 3000 * Probability of payoff = 250 3000 * P / 250 = 250/250 3000 / 250 * P = 1 12 * P = 1 ∴ P = 1 / 12 You require 8.3% of the computers to fail in years 2 and 3, and for the failure to cause $3000 worth of 'damage' avoidance, and for it to be something covered under the warranty terms, for your gamble to make sense. Judging by the fact they offer the warranty, I would imagine the fail rate to be somewhat lower than this, or for the failures to be vastly less expensive than that - else they'd be losing money.
brudgers 13y ago
What I found interesting is that the system used for all the benchmarks is significantly more expensive than the systems listed on the first page - 12 cores, 32gb Ram, and a 512gb SSD prices out at $7699, nearly double the cost of the more expensive of the two configurations listed on the first page, and it's still 10% more expensive than the "Most Expensive Configuration Upgrade Path" on page two - which means your wallet will be $700 bucks lighter. And that's probably generous - from the GPU analysis appears that the tested unit has D700's which bumps the price to $8299 - a configuration that isn't mentioned anywhere in the article. About the only thing left to upgrade on the test unit is the RAM to 64gb. Since the article calls itself a review, it would be better if the review unit was accurately described. It seems to me there's a bit of bait and switch because the performance numbers presented are not for the $3000 or $4000 presented in the article's lead.
- smackfu 13y ago
  The systems listed on the first page are the advertised base models from Apple. The unit they benchmarked for the review is presumably a review unit that they had no choice about. OTOH, it's a little surprising that Apple gave out 12 core review units, since the 8 core seems to be better at benchmarking.
  - rsynnott 13y ago
    They gave Macworld and The Verge, at least, 8 core units. Perhaps a case of know your audience; neither of those sites would be necessarily too inclined to go into _why_ the 12 core part is slower in many benchmarks, whereas Anandtech, of course, will.
  - brudgers 13y ago
    The author chose what to write and the editor chose what to edit and the publisher chose what to publish. Likewise, Apple chose what to send AnandTech, and chose to send the influential publication an $8300 machine rather than a more common model for benchmarking. In light of the fact that much less expensive machines often performed better, it seems obvious that the favorable conclusion of the review ought to provide some rational case for being so.
corresation 13y ago
The one strange assumption that most Mac Pro reviews start with is a baseline of two compute cards -- that the Mac Pro is competitive when compared with other machines with two high-end compute cards. But I don't want two high-end compute cards, and I suspect that many who are trying to convince themselves that they'll benefit from it will gain no value from it. For many, many workloads, modern compute still represents an iffy proposition (at the price levels being talked about, the Xeon Phi would almost certainly represent a better proposition). With unified memory things might get more workable, but as is it remains a relatively fringe benefit, and it seems odd that the entire value proposition of the machine relies upon it.
- xenophanes 13y ago
  so you think 2 compute cards is bad. but what about the mac pro approach 2 gfx cards? good or bad? not sure what position you're taking and curious.
  - corresation 13y ago
    Are you debating nomenclature? One of the GPUs is effectively dedicated to compute, while the other is architecturally chosen to optimize compute. These cards are geared to compute and not graphics.
    - xenophanes 13y ago
      Your post was unclear and I asked what you meant. I didn't debate anything. i was extremely clear and explicit about this. i asked a question, said i didn't know, said i was curious, didn't dispute anything you said. Only a domain expert could be expected to automatically know whether double GPUs is effectively the same thing as double CPUs or not. Apple has put a lot of effort into making their GPU structure effective (in general, not just for a few special cases), and I didn't know if you were saying they'd failed or not. i know parallel processing is hard, but i also know apple has smart people who've worked on it. i don't know things like whether "lack of unified memory" is a problem for apple's design too, or not. it seems completely plausible to me, not knowing the domain that well, that apple could have had something that works well in general, or not – i don't really know and you didn't say, just assumed your reader would somehow know what you meant (which will basically only work for people who already know your point and have no need to read your comment at all).
altero 13y ago
Configuration is kind of joke. 16GB RAM and zero free slots on high end desktop? My PC had the same price three years ago, but it has 5GHz CPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB on SSDs and 5 TB on spin HDDs.
- MBCook 13y ago
  The slots thing is a design decision. Apple doesn't think people need them, I think they may be right. The Thunderbolt connectors are direct to CPU, not even the north-bridge in the way. I remember when they said people wouldn't need ADB or SCSI. Or floppies. Or serial ports. It worked out. If your 5 GHz CPU a Xeon with ECC? The RAM can be upgraded (those are options), the SSD can be upgraded (1 TB is an option) and it's faster than SATA, and you can attach as many disks as you want in Thunderbolt arrays. Did you have dual GPUs for that price? It's a nice looking machine, very quiet, and very innovative. Maybe it will be a misstep, but I'm glad Apple is trying something interesting. I want to see what happens with this.
  - userbinator 13y ago
    >Apple doesn't think people need them I am more inclined to say Apple doesn't want people to think they need them.
    - ceejayoz 13y ago
      Thus far, they've made correct but initially mocked decisions on the necessity of floppy drives, optical drives, Ethernet ports, removable batteries, and physical keyboards. This may be another such case.
  - altero 13y ago
    I thing my desktop is nicer than this surounded by dozen external HDDs.
    - mturmon 13y ago
      Perish the thought! The solution they have in mind for expansion is more like: http://www.promise.com/news_room/news.aspx?m=23&region=en-global&rsn=1137 http://www.promise.com/news_room/news.aspx?m=23&region=en-gl... E.g., http://store.apple.com/us/product/HE153VC/A/promise-pegasus2-r6-18tb-6-by-3tb-thunderbolt-2-raid-system?fnode=5f http://store.apple.com/us/product/HE153VC/A/promise-pegasus2... I have had the predecessor device, a 6bay Thunderbolt RAID 6, for two years and it has been quiet and reliable.
themodelplumber 13y ago
I thought this post by the developer of Cheetah3D for Mac was interesting: http://www.cheetah3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=79977&postcount=6 http://www.cheetah3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=79977&postcoun... He's basically dumbfounded by the current situation :-)
patrickg_zill 13y ago
It is a well written review. Note that the D700 specs match closely with the R9 280, 280X, or 290, cards which sell retail for $349 to $449 or so each (the Mac Pro has 2 of these in the 2x D700 config). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Radeon_Rx_200_Series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Radeon_Rx_200_Series . The 2048 shaders would match with the 2048 number for the 280X, I think (if I am reading the chart right). The W7000 is the much more expensive "pro" version which has ECC RAM on the card and much less volume in terms of sales. It's funny though, I remember as a kid, thinking how cool it was that you could have a backpack-able computer (the original Macintosh could be ordered with a padded backpack). Now at 11 lbs and not very large, you could almost do the same again!
- asdfs 13y ago
  Were it not for the current shortage of 280X cards due to Litecoin mining, one could build a similar Hackintosh for quite a low price. Though you'd be stuck with 3GiB of memory per card rather than 6GiB (at least until MSI releases their 6GiB 280X, which they have listed on their site).
veidr 13y ago
For me the disappointing takeaway is that good high-res monitor support isn't implemented. Like the reviewer, I had assumed the same types of scaling options that the high-res MacBook Pros have. However, according to this review, the new Mac Pro doesn't work with the new Dell 4K monitors (I don't consider 30Hz refresh as 'working'), and even with the 4K display that Apple sells, it only works at its native 3840 x 2160 at 60Hz. When choosing a 'Scaled' resolution, it renders blurry junk. That is pretty disappointing (although I imagine it will be fixed at some point). http://anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013/11 http://anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013/11
- justincormack 13y ago
  It sounds like its not sane to get a 4k monitor now as a long term investment, as the monitor side is not standardised yet.
ksec 13y ago
1. People hate Apple for whatever they do. 2. Those who said Mac Pro makes no sense have absolutely zero understanding in GFX market. 3. People who cries about Money Vs what you get to buy and build have absolutely zero understanding about engineering trade off. ( Which I expect HNers to have even from a software engineering perspective )
Symmetry 13y ago
I wonder if there's a future for unified thermal cores in non-Mac systems? It seems like a pretty big win, but it looks hard coordinate around a design if you're not Apple doing everything in house.
- zanny 13y ago
  How would it be hard to coordinate? You don't even really need a single thermal model, you just need a standard heatsink layout for parts to align with. Which is complicated when you are trying to build hardware and realize "oh crap, the standard thermal layout leaves no room for us to actively cool <insert-x-part>, how are we gonna keep this thing from overheating? The way we have our computers laid out today - vertical pcie cards, cpu sockets with either the amd snap-brace or intel screw in backplate heatsinks - is entirely arbitrary, but for posterity it persists as nobody wants to be the guy to throw out 10+ years of expansion card compatibility.

M4v3R 13y ago

AnandTech hardware and Ars Technica's software (especially OS X) reviews are works of art by themselves. The level of details that goes into these pieces is nothing short of amazing. They are examples of tech journaling done right.

leephillips 13y ago
AnandTech is often the only place that measures and reports anything about the screens of computers, tablets, and phones aside from how many pixels they have (color space, color accuracy, etc.). For this alone they are gold.
- yapcguy 13y ago
  I like Anandtech but they have come into criticism recently, from some of their long-time readers, for fawning over Apple products.
  - gareim 13y ago
    Well that's silly. "Anandtech does great reviews unless it's favorable to something I'm not, so then those reviews must be biased". Either you trust Anandtech or you don't. And if you do, then you shouldn't call the reviews that go against your views as biased. By "you", I don't mean you, yapcguy. Just in general towards those that are criticizing Anandtech.
  - Watabou 13y ago
    It looks like your dislike of Apple somehow means that Anandtech is the one who is biased? Really? Come on now.
    - Cookingboy 13y ago
      He wasn't speaking for himself, he was talking about some of their readers.
      - sbuk 13y ago
        Reading his other comment, he's talking for himself.
      - revscat 13y ago
        Readers who are complained about far more often than they are actually seen.
      - freshyill 13y ago
        "Some say…" is the Fox News way of saying "we just made this up on the show that preceded this one". Unless someone can actually call their conclusions and numbers into question using actual facts, then it's just anti-Apple whining, whether it's him or "some readers".
    - yapcguy 13y ago
      Look, it's not just me sitting here complaining. http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2270612 http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2270612 Pretty much every review of Apple gear has people moaning about bias in the comments. I'm not saying there is any favoritism, but certainly the perception amongst Anandtech readers is that there might be. At the end of the day, there's no reason why the writers at Anandtech would be any more immune to access journalism than other folk who have tried and failed.
      - gress 13y ago
        Those kinds of complaints can be seen anywhere there is a positive review of Apple products. You are actually saying there is favoritism. It's dishonest to claim otherwise. You've just suggested that Anand has succumbed to access journalism. Why not just be honest about what you think, rather pretending to be disinterested reporting on the views of others? Let's also note that the commenter accusing AnandTech of bias in that comment thread you linked is resoundingly and overwhelmingly rebutted by other readers.
  - Cookingboy 13y ago
    That's just them being silly, since Apple actually do make fantastic products and care more than the superficial marketing specs wars (GHz race, number of cores race, megapixel race, screen size race, etc).
  - makomk 13y ago
    I can see why. They've been quite selective in what they compare the Mac Pro to in this review, for instance, because otherwise it wouldn't have come out so well. When they're arguing that it doesn't need expandability, they compare it to laptops and desktops that aren't expandable. Yet when it comes time to justify the pricing, they exclusively compare it to workstations that are aimed at a completely different market to desktops or laptops and have far more expansion options because that market expects them. If they compared the pricing to desktops and laptops or the expansion options to workstations, the Mac Pro would look a lot worse.
    - glasshead969 13y ago
      I feel like he addresses the new design as a risk which he thinks something that should be taken. If that's something target market doesn't appreciate,then ultimately this will be a failed product. But Mac Pro is targeted towards a different audience than a HP workstation. Its targeted towards Hollywood and Animation community where there is a lot of Thunderbolt penetration.
    - MBCook 13y ago
      I didn't see a big problem with it. They compared it's price to a few workstations to show that the price isn't unreasonable for similar hardware (i.e. Apple isn't adding a $1200 workstation tax). For the rest of the review they compared it to other Macs, because chances are that's what buyers are going to compare it with. If you want a Mac, those are your choices. I really doubt too many people who are in the market for an HP or Dell workstation are going to consider a Mac Pro. Plus there is the problem of benchmarks. The OS can make a big difference, so you'd either have to run every benchmark twice on each system (once on OS X, once on Windows or Linux), and then the non-Macs can't run OS X. It would be a ton of extra work, but I'm not sure how much gain it would give. Again, I think the number of workstation shoppers who will consider this machine is small. I expect the vast majority of it's sales will be to Mac users who want something more powerful than an iMac or a MacBook Pro.
      - morganherlocker 13y ago
        > I really doubt too many people who are in the market for an HP or Dell workstation are going to consider a Mac Pro Especially with the gap in Mac Pro releases over the past few years, I have seen many people deciding between Mac Pro and a custom built hackintosh. For the stuff that really justifies a Mac Pro, these were the only two options for some time (short of moving off of an OSX stack). Sure, someone custom building a multi thousand dollar work station is not your typical consumer, but neither is your typical buyer of a spec'd out Mac Pro.
  - caycep 13y ago
    I always attributed this to the anti-Apple-ism of the "enthusiast" crowd that like their machines big, over clocked, and running hot. Anandtech fawns over a lot of products, but I suspect perhaps this is due to them reviewing products they are interested in, and not wasting time on stuff they aren't. I'd start to worry if people can't reproduce their lab numbers but at the moment, they're considered the most detailed and accurate of the lot.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >I like Anandtech but they have come into criticism recently, from some of their long-time readers, for fawning over Apple products. Which, instantly, should be reason enough to understand that said criticism is BS. Apple products are among the best in the industry, period. Not just from the industrial design part of it, but overall: coherence of product vision, attention to important characteristics for the target market (battery time, portability, weight), quality machining and materials, attention to small details (from multitouch touchpad to magsafe adaptor and from backlit keyboard to magnetic, non protruding, lid hinge). These people think that because they are not speced and designed like gaming PCs they are not worthy ("I can have a better GPU for less money in my custom box, and with xeon lights on the sides too). And they attribute their popularity to some BS "reality distortion" effect, ignoring the fact that hardcore hackers, prominent programmers and old school neckerbeards, from Rob Pike, DHH, and Duncan Davidson to Jamie Jawinsky and Miguel De Icaza (the frigging founder of the Gnome desktop) down to Linus Torvalds, who waxes poetically about his MacBook Air as the best in the market. So, "fawning over Apple" justs translates to "did some favorable reviews of products, instead of making up BS reasons to dislike them".
    - yapcguy 13y ago
      Rob Pike wrote a blog post "Thank you Apple" (sarcasm) because of the problems he was having with his iMac and Apple's software. http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/09/thank-you-apple.html http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/09/thank-you-apple.ht... Linus Torvalds is said to be using the ChromeBook Pixel as his primary machine. http://www.geek.com/chips/linus-torvalds-is-making-the-chromebook-pixel-his-primary-laptop-1541940/ http://www.geek.com/chips/linus-torvalds-is-making-the-chrom... As for Miguel De Icaza, he's eating his own dog food, as he now makes his money selling an IDE for iOS development, so of course he's going to choose the Mac because that's where the toolchain is.
      - leephillips 13y ago
        From now on when people ask me why I use Linux instead of OSX and why I refuse to install closed-source, copy-protected software, I'm going to send them to Rob Pike's eloquent description of his self-inflicted torture.
  - Tloewald 13y ago
    It's funny how most PC review sites get into trouble for allegedly fawning over apple hardware once they start reviewing it regularly. I wonder why that might be?
- deviltry 13y ago
  Their game reviews are not that great when their long game reviewer left and replacement was brought.
- tanzam75 13y ago
  > AnandTech is often the only place that measures and reports anything about the screens of computers, tablets, and phones aside from how many pixels they have (color space, color accuracy, etc.). For this alone they are gold. Not the only place. I have found the German site NotebookCheck.net to be more thorough than Anandtech when it comes to laptop reviews. Not only do they measure color space and color accuracy, but they also measure backlighting levels across the screen, comment on backlight bleed, test for viewing angles, check the reflectiveness of screens, etc. In addition, they also test decibel levels of the fan, temperature of the laptop surface, etc. at various loads. They point out situations where a certain laptop may ship in two configurations. They point out the pros/cons of the nearest products from competing vendors, which have also been tested with equal thoroughness. In other words, they actually test the machines against a checklist, to assess the performance of each element. In contrast, when an Anandtech reviewer claims that a machine is quiet or that the screen is matte, you don't actually get all the information. Maybe the ventilation system was masking some of the sound. Maybe the screen is only semi-matte. The only problem is that NotebookCheck is based in Germany, so some of the machines they review are not available in the United States. Still, I'm happy restricting my choices a bit to avoid being surprised with a laptop purchase.
  - leephillips 13y ago
    This sounds like an excellent site, thanks for the tip.
davidy123 13y ago
Really? It's the same format that's been around since the earliest days of Web reviews. Newer sites are moving on to data allowing comparisons between anything (storagereview was an early leader in that). Although it's not quite as pathetic as sites that post screen captures of benchmark programs, I find sites like anandtech are like quaint bedtime stories in comparison.
epsylon 13y ago
I know people on HN enjoy being hyperbolic, but I certainly wouldn't call a piece of tech journalism art.

PythonDeveloper 13y ago

Nonetheless, STOP spamming your site on HackerNews

thirdsight 13y ago

I'm glad they mention the HP Z420. The killer for me on the Z420: three-year Mon-Fri 8-5 next business day, parts, labor and 24x7 phone support, They come to me. Edit: to all the naysayers: I'm in the UK. HP here is pretty good. We have over 200 machines on next day and we've had only two (!) problems and they were relating to part supply resulting in a quick purchase on Misco that arrived next day.

codex 13y ago
In most locations you can get 4-hour support by buying AppleCare Premium.
- thirdsight 13y ago
  Not in Europe which means that isn't most locations!
x0x0 13y ago
Hi. I'm a hp warranty victim; an so's old laptop had 3 year next business day support. On three occasions those lying sacks of shit made us mail it to them for a week at a time. Don't believe it; your "next day" warranty is just a donation of beer money for hp execs.
- Moto7451 13y ago
  When I worked at a pharmacy doing IT work, they purchased some desktops from HP with a multi year on site support deal. One day we had a computer's Hard Drive die so we called them up to fix it, which they did... and nothing more. I asked them about putting Windows back on it (as the restore partition was nowhere to be found) and the guy said "not our department." I ended up torrenting an HP restore ISO and thankfully the BIOS's licensing key matched the ISO.
marincounty 13y ago
Yea--I spent an embarrassing amout of time trying to fix a HP laptop. The Nvidia chip didn't touch the cooling bar--I think--long time ago. Customers eventually won a lawsuit, but I wasen't notified? HP really need to clean up their image. If any Sonoma State Grads read this--forward to the next CEO.

thearn4 13y ago

Do a lot of folks here generally like Mac desktops? I've grown to like Macbooks because I do like working on a portable UNIX-y platform, and have had generally bad luck with Linux laptops in the past. On desktops though, I'm willing to put more effort into settling software update issues/device conflicts, since I probably have to do that anyway to write performance-optimized code (depends on the exact purpose of the desktop though, but I do a lot of scientific computing). So a Linux/Windows split boot on a generic PC usually wins out. I used to do a lot of PC gaming, but that's really less of a factor now.

e40 13y ago
After running every version of Windows since 3.1, I've decided to go Mac for my desktop. I run stuff on it 24/7 and have 6 external disks, so a MBP is out of the question. The cost of external enclosures, though, for the new Mac Pro makes it out of reach ($3000 + $2400 = $5400... I can put together a nice hackintosh for $1700).
- melvinram 13y ago
  The DIY PC route is still going to be more affordable. If we go the Ivy Bridge E route and opt for a Core i7-4930K, you get more cores than either of the options above for around $600 for the CPU. Adding in another $330 for a motherboard, $180 for 12GB of DDR3-1866 memory, $1400 for two W7000 GPUs and $220 for a fast SATA SSD (Samsung 840 Pro) we’re at $2730 for a configuration that would cost at least $3499 from Apple. That’s excluding case, PSU and OS, but adding another ~$350 takes care of that and still saves you some money. As the AnandTech review points out, you're looking at $2700ish if you opt for hardware that is apples to apples comparison... regardless of whether you went with hackintosh, Linux, or Windows.
  - revelation 13y ago
    Only because of the workstation GPUs. You can get better performance for much less if you don't need the special labeling.

songgao 13y ago

Does anybody know how much work is required to run Linux on this thing? I read some documents but found them complicated enough that I don't want to deal with on my daily computer. Also there seems to be driver problem related to thermal issues. So I ended up with virtual machines every time considering installing Linux on Mac. Anybody running Linux on Macbooks or Mac Pro? Does it work well?

lemonberry 13y ago
I think Linus runs linux on a Macbook Air. Techcrunch interview here: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/19/an-interview-with-millenium-technology-prize-finalist-linus-torvalds/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/19/an-interview-with-millenium... *edited to add link
- codemac 13y ago
  He's on a chromebook pixel these days.
- green7ea 13y ago
  He switched to a chromebook pixel recently: https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/dk1aiW4JjHd https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/dk1aiW4JjHd
PhineasRex 13y ago
I run Linux on a Macbook Pro (late 2013). It works remarkably well considering this hardware came out a few months ago. The only thing that doesn't work are the Thunderbolt ports (they work for everything except monitors, which crashes the machine after ~10 minutes).

guelo 13y ago

Wow. For me, the big takeaway from this review are the benchmarks showing the iMac and MBPs beating out the Mac Pro. That shows that this machine is really for niche markets like professional video editing. Makes you wonder why Apple even bothers.

icegreentea 13y ago
In general, the MacPro loses out in single-thread performance only, since Xeons are typically one architecture behind. When the Haswell based Xeons come out, Apple will refresh the Mac Pro line, and you'll get parity single-thread performance.
- seabrookmx 13y ago
  Do we know that though? Historically speaking, the Mac Pro doesn't get updated nearly as often as Intel releases a new architecture.
  - rsynnott 13y ago
    It actually did for a long time; then they skipped a few iterations. Maybe they'll do that again, maybe they won't; we'll see.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  What are the odds the Haswell Xeons will use the same socket as the current Xeons?
  - wmf 13y ago
    Zero since Haswell-EP uses DDR4.
    - duskwuff 13y ago
      That being said, I wonder what the chances are that Apple will use the same socket for the Haswell-EP CPU daughterboard. Is there anything obvious that'd prevent them from doing that (e.g, chipset compatibility)?

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

marincounty 13y ago

Apple needs to fix Mavericks before I ever buy anything from them. They have so much cash, and so many bugs in Mavericks?

yapcguy 13y ago
iOS is insecure, Mavericks buggy as hell, iCloud can't keep the lights on. One has to wonder what all their engineers are actually working on.
- gress 13y ago
  How is iOS insecure?
  - Watabou 13y ago
    I would ignore him. He clearly has no idea what he's saying. No one I've talked to has called Mavericks "buggy as hell".
    - protomyth 13y ago
      I would say at least the Finder in Mavericks is "buggy as hell"[1]. It looks like it has a real issue with preview images (when the file is dragged to another window), Applescript, and updating based on file system changes. 1) my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6993850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6993850
    - corresation 13y ago
      Mavericks is absolutely a regression. My Mac Mini i7 (2013), for instance, will regularly recover from sleep with a black screen. Now if you are careful you can log in (hope the context is in the password box, type your password and return), but this has been there since Mavericks release. Many people have reported it. Still there. It is among a long list of bizarre oddities and system quirks that simply didn't happen pre-Mavericks.
  - deleted 13y ago

at-fates-hands 13y ago

Interesting they compared the new Mac to a workstation. Older workstations these days are a lot more affordable and can easily be upgraded. Most MACS you're stuck with what you get. Case in point, I just purchased an HP 8400 workstation for a friend. $320 for a dual proc 2.6GHz quad core Xeon, 16GB RAM, Two 320GB SAS drives in RAID config and ATI Fire V7350 1GB video card. Sure its a pig and isn't the quietest PC in the room, but it completely shreds anything I could find in a retail setting.

Cookingboy 13y ago
Really? $320 for a new machine with that spec? That graphics card alone costed more than that when it was new, did the CPU/storage/power supply come at negative price? If this was true, it would really explain HP's financial situation /s EDIT: that graphics card despite being old, still sells for $300 on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/ATI-100-505143-FireGL-512-bit-Express/dp/B000EWEPB4 http://www.amazon.com/ATI-100-505143-FireGL-512-bit-Express/...
- LukeShu 13y ago
  Read closer. He "just" recently paid that. The HP 8400 is what, a 2007 machine? The prices when the parts were new is irrelevant.
  - Cookingboy 13y ago
    I suspected as much, but then it's silly to bring it into a cost/performance comparison against a brand new top of the line 2013 desktop. Yes they are upgradable, but by the time you upgrade them to modern spec it will cost a lot more than $320.
mwfunk 13y ago
"MACS"?
- mortenjorck 13y ago
  Writing "Mac" in all caps as if the writer obtusely believes it to be an acronym for something is part of the style manual for passive-aggressive platform debate.

bfrog 13y ago

A 1 year warranty is such a joke for this much money. I think this and the new mbp where should anything break you need a full replacement basically, need to have some serious warranty coverage changes. 3 years minimum in my mind. Just another way to nickle and dime you on something like an almost required extended warranty. Apple, your stuff is mostly nice. Fix your product warranty and maybe I'll open my wallet.

umsm 13y ago
Isn't it worth it to purchase the Applecare warranty for $250 which extends the warranty period to 3 years? When you're spending $3k on a computer, I don't see how $250 will really affect the bottom line...
- bane 13y ago
  When the customer is spending north of $3k on a computer, why not toss in the warranty for free?
  - Watabou 13y ago
    When you see the price of the dual GPUs, the ECC RAM, PCIe SSD, and the small design, you will see why they didn't toss in the warranty for free. You do get 1 year free warranty though and that's something. It's only $249 for the extra two years which is worth it in my opinion.
    - leoc 13y ago
      ECC isn't that much more expensive, while AFAIK the price premium for pro-model GPUs is almost pure price-gouging, and Apple's surely not paying those inflated prices for the GPUs.
- 6d0debc071 13y ago
  > Isn't it worth it to purchase the Applecare warranty for $250 which extends the warranty period to 3 years? payoff * Probability of payoff = EV 3000 * Probability of payoff = 250 3000 * P / 250 = 250/250 3000 / 250 * P = 1 12 * P = 1 ∴ P = 1 / 12 You require 8.3% of the computers to fail in years 2 and 3, and for the failure to cause $3000 worth of 'damage' avoidance, and for it to be something covered under the warranty terms, for your gamble to make sense. Judging by the fact they offer the warranty, I would imagine the fail rate to be somewhat lower than this, or for the failures to be vastly less expensive than that - else they'd be losing money.

brudgers 13y ago

What I found interesting is that the system used for all the benchmarks is significantly more expensive than the systems listed on the first page - 12 cores, 32gb Ram, and a 512gb SSD prices out at $7699, nearly double the cost of the more expensive of the two configurations listed on the first page, and it's still 10% more expensive than the "Most Expensive Configuration Upgrade Path" on page two - which means your wallet will be $700 bucks lighter. And that's probably generous - from the GPU analysis appears that the tested unit has D700's which bumps the price to $8299 - a configuration that isn't mentioned anywhere in the article. About the only thing left to upgrade on the test unit is the RAM to 64gb. Since the article calls itself a review, it would be better if the review unit was accurately described. It seems to me there's a bit of bait and switch because the performance numbers presented are not for the $3000 or $4000 presented in the article's lead.

smackfu 13y ago
The systems listed on the first page are the advertised base models from Apple. The unit they benchmarked for the review is presumably a review unit that they had no choice about. OTOH, it's a little surprising that Apple gave out 12 core review units, since the 8 core seems to be better at benchmarking.
- rsynnott 13y ago
  They gave Macworld and The Verge, at least, 8 core units. Perhaps a case of know your audience; neither of those sites would be necessarily too inclined to go into _why_ the 12 core part is slower in many benchmarks, whereas Anandtech, of course, will.
- brudgers 13y ago
  The author chose what to write and the editor chose what to edit and the publisher chose what to publish. Likewise, Apple chose what to send AnandTech, and chose to send the influential publication an $8300 machine rather than a more common model for benchmarking. In light of the fact that much less expensive machines often performed better, it seems obvious that the favorable conclusion of the review ought to provide some rational case for being so.

corresation 13y ago

The one strange assumption that most Mac Pro reviews start with is a baseline of two compute cards -- that the Mac Pro is competitive when compared with other machines with two high-end compute cards. But I don't want two high-end compute cards, and I suspect that many who are trying to convince themselves that they'll benefit from it will gain no value from it. For many, many workloads, modern compute still represents an iffy proposition (at the price levels being talked about, the Xeon Phi would almost certainly represent a better proposition). With unified memory things might get more workable, but as is it remains a relatively fringe benefit, and it seems odd that the entire value proposition of the machine relies upon it.

xenophanes 13y ago
so you think 2 compute cards is bad. but what about the mac pro approach 2 gfx cards? good or bad? not sure what position you're taking and curious.
- corresation 13y ago
  Are you debating nomenclature? One of the GPUs is effectively dedicated to compute, while the other is architecturally chosen to optimize compute. These cards are geared to compute and not graphics.
  - xenophanes 13y ago
    Your post was unclear and I asked what you meant. I didn't debate anything. i was extremely clear and explicit about this. i asked a question, said i didn't know, said i was curious, didn't dispute anything you said. Only a domain expert could be expected to automatically know whether double GPUs is effectively the same thing as double CPUs or not. Apple has put a lot of effort into making their GPU structure effective (in general, not just for a few special cases), and I didn't know if you were saying they'd failed or not. i know parallel processing is hard, but i also know apple has smart people who've worked on it. i don't know things like whether "lack of unified memory" is a problem for apple's design too, or not. it seems completely plausible to me, not knowing the domain that well, that apple could have had something that works well in general, or not – i don't really know and you didn't say, just assumed your reader would somehow know what you meant (which will basically only work for people who already know your point and have no need to read your comment at all).

altero 13y ago

Configuration is kind of joke. 16GB RAM and zero free slots on high end desktop? My PC had the same price three years ago, but it has 5GHz CPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB on SSDs and 5 TB on spin HDDs.

MBCook 13y ago
The slots thing is a design decision. Apple doesn't think people need them, I think they may be right. The Thunderbolt connectors are direct to CPU, not even the north-bridge in the way. I remember when they said people wouldn't need ADB or SCSI. Or floppies. Or serial ports. It worked out. If your 5 GHz CPU a Xeon with ECC? The RAM can be upgraded (those are options), the SSD can be upgraded (1 TB is an option) and it's faster than SATA, and you can attach as many disks as you want in Thunderbolt arrays. Did you have dual GPUs for that price? It's a nice looking machine, very quiet, and very innovative. Maybe it will be a misstep, but I'm glad Apple is trying something interesting. I want to see what happens with this.
- userbinator 13y ago
  >Apple doesn't think people need them I am more inclined to say Apple doesn't want people to think they need them.
  - ceejayoz 13y ago
    Thus far, they've made correct but initially mocked decisions on the necessity of floppy drives, optical drives, Ethernet ports, removable batteries, and physical keyboards. This may be another such case.
- altero 13y ago
  I thing my desktop is nicer than this surounded by dozen external HDDs.
  - mturmon 13y ago
    Perish the thought! The solution they have in mind for expansion is more like: http://www.promise.com/news_room/news.aspx?m=23&region=en-global&rsn=1137 http://www.promise.com/news_room/news.aspx?m=23&region=en-gl... E.g., http://store.apple.com/us/product/HE153VC/A/promise-pegasus2-r6-18tb-6-by-3tb-thunderbolt-2-raid-system?fnode=5f http://store.apple.com/us/product/HE153VC/A/promise-pegasus2... I have had the predecessor device, a 6bay Thunderbolt RAID 6, for two years and it has been quiet and reliable.

themodelplumber 13y ago

I thought this post by the developer of Cheetah3D for Mac was interesting: http://www.cheetah3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=79977&postcount=6 http://www.cheetah3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=79977&postcoun... He's basically dumbfounded by the current situation :-)

patrickg_zill 13y ago

It is a well written review. Note that the D700 specs match closely with the R9 280, 280X, or 290, cards which sell retail for $349 to $449 or so each (the Mac Pro has 2 of these in the 2x D700 config). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Radeon_Rx_200_Series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Radeon_Rx_200_Series . The 2048 shaders would match with the 2048 number for the 280X, I think (if I am reading the chart right). The W7000 is the much more expensive "pro" version which has ECC RAM on the card and much less volume in terms of sales. It's funny though, I remember as a kid, thinking how cool it was that you could have a backpack-able computer (the original Macintosh could be ordered with a padded backpack). Now at 11 lbs and not very large, you could almost do the same again!

asdfs 13y ago
Were it not for the current shortage of 280X cards due to Litecoin mining, one could build a similar Hackintosh for quite a low price. Though you'd be stuck with 3GiB of memory per card rather than 6GiB (at least until MSI releases their 6GiB 280X, which they have listed on their site).

veidr 13y ago

For me the disappointing takeaway is that good high-res monitor support isn't implemented. Like the reviewer, I had assumed the same types of scaling options that the high-res MacBook Pros have. However, according to this review, the new Mac Pro doesn't work with the new Dell 4K monitors (I don't consider 30Hz refresh as 'working'), and even with the 4K display that Apple sells, it only works at its native 3840 x 2160 at 60Hz. When choosing a 'Scaled' resolution, it renders blurry junk. That is pretty disappointing (although I imagine it will be fixed at some point). http://anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013/11 http://anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013/11

justincormack 13y ago
It sounds like its not sane to get a 4k monitor now as a long term investment, as the monitor side is not standardised yet.

ksec 13y ago

1. People hate Apple for whatever they do. 2. Those who said Mac Pro makes no sense have absolutely zero understanding in GFX market. 3. People who cries about Money Vs what you get to buy and build have absolutely zero understanding about engineering trade off. ( Which I expect HNers to have even from a software engineering perspective )

Symmetry 13y ago

I wonder if there's a future for unified thermal cores in non-Mac systems? It seems like a pretty big win, but it looks hard coordinate around a design if you're not Apple doing everything in house.

zanny 13y ago
How would it be hard to coordinate? You don't even really need a single thermal model, you just need a standard heatsink layout for parts to align with. Which is complicated when you are trying to build hardware and realize "oh crap, the standard thermal layout leaves no room for us to actively cool <insert-x-part>, how are we gonna keep this thing from overheating? The way we have our computers laid out today - vertical pcie cards, cpu sockets with either the amd snap-brace or intel screw in backplate heatsinks - is entirely arbitrary, but for posterity it persists as nobody wants to be the guy to throw out 10+ years of expansion card compatibility.