[Moogs]

The Cheese Grater is long overdue for an overhaul in terms of form factor, etc. The innards have been "nicely evolved" two or three times but that's not the same thing as a redesign. The current design is almost exactly 9 years old. So maybe we should assume a new design every 10 years.

[Xaqtly]

Well I think my Pro will last for another year at least, and my 5870 card is only a year or two old at this point so it'll probably hang on too. I'm actually excited about what they might be doing for the pro market.

[Moogs]

It appears the RDF still holds sway over us all. The spirit of Steve lives!

[pscates2.0]

It do.

I was thinking about the same thing Chinney asked...knowing Apple, how would they approach a pro-level workstation in 2012-2013? It's easy to say "it doesn't have to look good", but you know good and well Apple won't churn out ugly crap. They're going to make it look nice and interesting, even if it's tucked into a closet or under a desk in many cases.

I suppose a tower, as we know it, is the standard approach. But do any others shapes or forms make sense?

The Mac Pro is quite large, but with all those bays and stuff, I guess it needs to be. That's what I was asking earlier...what all is required, in the minds of Mac Pro fans, for a true, no-apologies pro tower everyone can be proud of (or drool over)?

How many bays, how many slots, what kinds of ports (and how many)? Are there products or approaches in 2012 that make it to where the design and features from 2003 no longer have to be present?

These are the things I don't know, and am curious about.

[Kickaha]

*cough* CPU Pro brain box. Expansion Pro slot box. Connect with Thunderbolt (PCIe 2.0+ speeds).

Decouple power from expandability.

FINALLY.

Hell, it'd let someone with a MacBook Pro have an expansion slot box on their desk for Serious Work(tm), and still be off and running in a flash out the door with everything but the PCI cards under their arm.

Or, say you have an iMac, and want to add an expansion card. Buy the slot box. Boom.

Or, it'd make for a nice Mac mini Pro box. Killer CPU/RAM combo for those who need raw compute power, but none of the expansion slots.

Apple, under Jobs, had Frog Design do a system design along these lines back in, jeez... 1983? Now they have the technology to do it right.

(I really thought they were going to go this route a decade ago, with external PCI bus, but it never came to pass. With Thunderbolt, they're going all-in across their machines, slowly but surely, and it lets them add expandability to *any* Mac.)

[Eugene]

Originally Posted by Kickaha Apple, under Jobs, had Frog Design do a system design along these lines back in, jeez... 1983? Now they have the technology to do it right.

Macuser or Macworld Magazine also commissioned Frog Design in the 90s to come up with a few 'modular' Mac concepts, though I think they used rails instead of making the tentacle rape Mac I'd expect in this day. I wish I could find a scan or uploaded images of the thing.

[GSpotter]

This reminds me of the Schneider DCS Hifi components from the 80s (DCS = Direct contact system). Stackable Hifi components which didn't need additional cables.

I always thought there are basically several different types of MacPro customers: Those who just want a headless desktop with a desktop-worthy performance (i.e. the lowend-model customers) and the high-end-performance customers from media, research etc. shops which need the most computing power they can afford, often coupled with the need for specialized expansion cards (video processors, sensors, ...)

By making the MacPro modular, you could decrease the price of the computer box, and only those who neeed the expansion get the expansion box, too.

[nikstar101]

I am one of the low end model customers, as GSpotter puts it, as the main reason foes getting a Mac Pro is for the separate display and some performance (better than a mini). But my requirements are to hold multiple hard drives that are user upgradable. And to have an upgradable graphics card and ones that the relatively powerful.

For example I kept my Power Mac G5 for 5 years just upgrading the graphics card and HDs as I need to. As most of the stuff I do is photography for my own use so outright speed is not so moot taint but running our of disk space is a right pain in the arse.

I know other here do all sorts of clever video etc stuff. So they will fall into the professional Mac Pro users but I think that Apple will still keep roughly the same form factor for the Mac Pro. I cannot see it radically changing as trying to get 4 HDs into any chassis is a challenge with full length graphics cards etc.

[Kickaha]

I will say that I've never understood the impulse/need to have all the drives in one enclosure.

Can you explain why this is better than simply having an external box?

[PB PM]

Until Apple introduced Thunderbolt, external drives for Macs were always slower than internal drives. That alone makes a Mac Pro worth while. Add the fact that the drives are always on and ready to go, and you have a killer package.

External drives are messy (cables, power bricks), ugly, have stupidly bright LEDs, and take up desk space. Drives are more likely to fail in external storage, since most are passively cooled.

Most users don't have enough drives to understand why external drives suck so bad. I have 4 external drives I use on a regular basis, (time machine) backup, movies and TV shows, photo storage and photo backup. Powering those drives up and down manually is pain, and leaving them on all the time isn't practical. If I had a Mac Pro with four 2TB drives this wouldn't even be an issue, the machine would power the drives up and down as needed.

[Chinney]

Is there not still a difference in speed between Thunderbolt, as good as it is, and a directly-connected internal drive? Or am I misunderstanding?

[PB PM]

Thunderbolt is more than enough for HDDs and most SSDs. The only time it could be limited would be a RAID setup.

[Kickaha]

Originally Posted by Chinney Is there not still a difference in speed between Thunderbolt, as good as it is, and a directly-connected internal drive? Or am I misunderstanding?

Thunderbolt is a PCIe port. Plugging anything into it is effectively the same as plugging it into a PCI expansion slot. That's the beauty of it. It's 20Gb/sec.

SATAII is 300MB/sec, or 2.4Gb/sec.

Thunderbolt is faster than I think physical drives can *go*.

[Kickaha]

Originally Posted by PB PM Until Apple introduced Thunderbolt, external drives for Macs were always slower than internal drives. That alone makes a Mac Pro worth while. Add the fact that the drives are always on and ready to go, and you have a killer package. External drives are messy (cables, power bricks), ugly, have stupidly bright LEDs, and take up desk space. Drives are more likely to fail in external storage, since most are passively cooled. Most users don't have enough drives to understand why external drives suck so bad. I have 4 external drives I use on a regular basis, (time machine) backup, movies and TV shows, photo storage and photo backup. Powering those drives up and down manually is pain, and leaving them on all the time isn't practical. If I had a Mac Pro with four 2TB drives this wouldn't even be an issue, the machine would power the drives up and down as needed.

Alright, the speed, cooling and manual powering (drive sleep isn't sufficient?) are good points.

Speed is taken care of, now.

Would an active cooled 2 or 4 bay drive enclosure work as well?

As for stupid bright LEDs (I agree - hate 'em), try putting a piece of matte Scotch tape over it, and scribbling over it with a black Sharpie. Cuts the LED brightness by about 90%. Visible, but not searingly bright.

[PB PM]

Right now the solution I have isn't great, but once I get a 6TB TB external it won't be as much of a issue. Of course unless prices come down thats goign to cost $600.

Right now leaving four drives powered on (even asleep) means I'm wasting power, since each brick draws 30-40W (crazy since drives only need 10-15 max).

[alcimedes]

We picked up one of the Promise 6TB raids at work last week. Holy balls is it fast. I'm very, very impressed with both TB and the hardware it connected to. Put our old XServe RAID to shame.

[Kickaha]

http://www.electronista.com/articles....pc ie.cards/

And so it begins.

[PB PM]

That is good news, although it would be nice if they release full length card support.

[Kickaha]

Indeed. I still maintain that a Pro brain box and a Tbolt slot box should make up the next gen Mac Pro. Give folks with little need for expansion slots a kick-ass compute node, and give folks with little need for raw compute power a way to add expansion cards to any Mac.

Tying compute power and expansion just doesn't seem to make sense any more, IMO.

[PB PM]

Agreed, in a world where most users, even power users, have a notebook at their primary computer we need to move past the mega tower era.

[turtle]

Link update on yours Kickaha:

http://www.electronista.com/articles...erbol t.macs/

[Dave]

Originally Posted by Kickaha Indeed. I still maintain that a Pro brain box and a Tbolt slot box should make up the next gen Mac Pro. Give folks with little need for expansion slots a kick-ass compute node, and give folks with little need for raw compute power a way to add expansion cards to any Mac. Tying compute power and expansion just doesn't seem to make sense any more, IMO.

Thunderbolt only has 8x worth of bandwidth, so just one 16x card is already more than it can handle. I suppose you could have a dozen or so Thunderbolt ports on the computer and the expansion chassis, but that seems a bit overly complicated... Why not use a higher-bandwidth port (I don't know of any off the top of my head) or leave PCIe slots internal?

[Moogs]

Interesting development but that device isn't going to solve the PCI problem for anyone. Although as the break out boxes become more powerful / have more capacity one could argue it.

[Moogs]

http://www.macrumors.com/2012/08/09/...d-imac-models/

[Xaqtly]

Full redesign in 2013, huh? Well I can wait that long to replace mine. It's still trucking along.

[Moogs]

Looks like we'll get full value and more out of our existing models.