Andy, thanks for your detailed, engineering-oriented response. It's very interesting to see a non-production perspective.
[Andrew Richards] "It depends very much on what it looks like and what it contains. If it is a brand new case design with crazy-good guts, I think it is a signal Apple sees a long tail for this class of product. If it is another iteration of the 9-year-old cheese grater hulk chassis, my inference is that they don't see much of a future for that class of product at Apple."
Great point. Honestly, I have been surprised every time the case hasn't been redesigned. At a minimum, the non-rackability for no good reason is a continuing frustration.
"Cheese grater hulk" is a great phrase, and I think it goes very nicely with "sizzle core beast."
[Andrew Richards] "More DIMM slots would be nice, but not essential for sock rocking."
As long as OS X supports a maximum of 96 GB of RAM, I don't think anyone needs more RAM slots for sock rocking.
[Andrew Richards] "ESXi 5."
Now I'm very curious. What OSes are you virtualizing? How many VMs (and with what specs) are you running on a single machine? What's the nature of the work the apps running on your VMs do? If this is your primary use for the Mac Pro, what makes OS X on Apple hardware more sock rocking than Linux on PC hardware?
[Andrew Richards] "I've speculated in perhaps all the threads you linked to above that the limiting factor in GPU choice is and has been EFI. Now that EFI is getting a foothold beyond Apple, we really ought to see better 3rd party support for GPUs and not just the few models Apple subsidizes for use as factory options."
I agree -- but I think that GPU choice is only the first hurdle to overcome.
Driver quality has been a big issue. When I started running a GTX 285 for Resolve last year, kernel panics were so common I had to buy a remote rebooter so I could get reliable access to my workstation over my VPN while I was on the road. Kernel panics were also common with the GeForce GT 330M built in to my 2010 MBP.
I side-graded to a Quadro 4000, which eliminated my kernel panics (though other users running other apps still had problems), but it took NVIDIA and Apple a long time to get on the same page for a driver release schedule. I had to remove the card and replace it with the original ATI to boot the 10.6.7 update, and OpenCL support took forever to materialize.
Ron pointed out OS X's poor OpenGL support. This may not a problem for most, but it's a big deal for 3D application's viewport performance. The same hardware has historically performed better on Windows than on Mac.
10-bit DisplayPort output is still impossible with OS X.
I'm not saying that this won't improve -- I'm just saying that being able to pop the latest and greatest GTX series GPU into a Mac Pro won't immediately address the ongoing criticisms of OS X's graphics support.
[Andrew Richards] "To keep OS X viable for big work. Xcode developers (including those who focus on iOS), research scientists, and creatives are the traditional Mac Pro constituencies and all of them are underserved with something less than a Mac Pro."
I agree, but I'm questioning if Apple is giving "big work" a reason to stay on the Mac platform.
I can't speak to the systems that most developers are using, but I think Bill D. might talk about how the App Store is democratizing development, letting little guys with laptops get in on iOS development without making big-iron infrastructure investments.
Apple doesn't seem to be actively pursuing the high performance computing market anymore. XGrid remains untouched, there's no more XServe for high-density clusters, and Apple doesn't have a Top 500 system anymore.
Anecdotally, I've seen the bulk of the creative market largely shifting away from Mac Pros toward iMacs. Graphic designers who used to buy Mac Pros are getting iMacs or MBPs instead. Thunderbolt makes the expansion needed by video editors possible on non-workstation systems. The only remaining creatives who will really need Mac Pros are on the high-end: 3D, compositing, coloring, audio -- and they might be better served by Windows workstations.
Personally, I feel like Apple used to be interested in providing my solutions I could use. I'm feeling that they are less and less committed to users like me. Even a little thing like pre-announcing a new Mac Pro, like HP has done with the Z820, would go a long way towards re-assuring other longtime Apple users in my position.
[Andrew Richards] "The problem is there is no real evidence that Apple is phasing out OS X. On the contrary, they have doubled down on the desktop and will be releasing a new major version every year like they have been with iOS."
I'm largely unconcerned about OS X. I agree that it's not going anywhere, and I don't really see "dumbed down" interfaces like LaunchPad (or Metro, for that matter) as huge obstacles. I spend very little time interacting with the operating system itself; most of my time on a workstation is spent in the apps I bought it to use.
The only possible concern I see at the moment for OS X is a big maybe: Apple's potential war on hierarchical filesystems in general. Apple's own apps may not need them, but most of the other apps I use assume a hierarchical file system. I'll be curious to see how this shakes out in coming versions of OS X.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at
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