I have a 4 year old Mac Pro 2.66 Zeon, 16 gig ram, 4 drives, ISCI, dual apple LED's etc... It's getting a little long in the tooth but it appears Apple is getting ready to kick the line to the curb. A. Does anyone know what's going on with this line, and B. If they are sunsetting it, what are my options? The iMac doesn't seem robust enough or have the flexibility I'm used to...
Earlier in the year Tim Cook made a statement which led people to believe that the next iteration of mac pros would be in 2013. I can't find the exact statement though-- but it's possible that they're waiting for intels next Xeon (based on Haswell rather than the es-2600 Ivy Bridge ones).
Lots of professionals who prefer OSX are taking matters in their own hands and building Hackintoshs. Some rumors are saying won't be new MacPros until next September.
Hey I'm still plugging away with my MacPro 1,1. 4 internal drives, 2 mirrored, 1 scratch 1 OS, 2 external esata enclosures via a $20 OWC esata cable, 10 GB of RAM. Six years out of a production machine is pretty amazing.
I was considering upgrading this year but I'll wait until the new MacPro's come out. I'm hoping for the same form factor so I can just plop my drives into it although I might do a SSD for the OS. Hope Apple return to the high end display market.
I also still have my 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 and it performs outstandingly. My next system, however, will be a custom build, as I'm a little distraught that I can't upgrade to SATA III drives. As mentioned above, I can always Hackintosh it if I wish to keep using OSX.
To get by with my 2006 MacPro until the new machines come out, I added a OWC SSD drive kit. The Pro has picked up considerable speed. Photoshop and Bridge both have noticeable improvement in performance.
Mike Schneider wrote:
I also still have my 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 and it performs outstandingly. My next system, however, will be a custom build, as I'm a little distraught that I can't upgrade to SATA III drives. As mentioned above, I can always Hackintosh it if I wish to keep using OSX.
How deep are your pockets?
There's probably a compatible enterprise-grade SATA 6Gb/s interface board you could slap in that puppy. The SATA "backplane" in the '06–'08 Mac Pro models is a standard Molex iPass cable assembled to a custom length.
I was going to buy Mac Pro this year this month, but seems some told me to wait, i hate to wait, but i don't have any choice, it will be long to wait until next year.
shmoogy wrote:
...It's possible that they're waiting for intels next Xeon (based on Haswell rather than the es-2600 Ivy Bridge ones).
I'm pretty sure this is it. I could be wrong - but last I remember, Intel didn't have an official plan for thunderbolt and Xeon integration with the current platform.
My vote to apple would be to drop the reliance on Xeon only workstations - I'd prefer the guts of a "desktop i7" like the imac in a chassis like the mac pro - But if they go this route, they can't do multi CPU builds - so it makes sense why they haven't done this yet (split up the motherboard design into consumer CPU versions and Xeon CPU versions).
And IMHO - cutting red footage with FCP X and watching all mac pro cores get utilized makes me think that apple will not be dropping a "pro" desktop like people fear they will.
openCL and Grand Central Dispatch were not developed so they could maximize single CPU machines.
I'm sure if Steve were alive he might say in one to those emails to a customer.
"For 5 or 6 thousand dollars in a year you'll have 20 real cores and 20 Hyper-Thread cores munching on red footage for breakfast. Those cores won't do much for Photoshop though. In the mean time shut-up and buy a MBP."
WAYCOOL wrote:
Lots of professionals who prefer OSX are taking matters in their own hands and building Hackintoshs. Some rumors are saying won't be new MacPros until next September.
Interesting. But lets not get too shocked by this. DEC have moved over to RISC based chips in their servers, now HP are doing the same (I think), AMD recently announced a move towards RISC architecture for server platforms. With the low heat output you can jam a ton of ARMs into a MacPro box and be well and truly thumbs up. Moving to a more energy economical platform is well in their corporate profile but I honestly can see them pulling this off sooner rather than later because they like to appear to be ahead of the curve.
Computing is changing, we are moving towards a world were mobile devices are just windows for the work done on cloud based servers. Is it really so surprising that we can have desktops that can be as powerful as we need just by increasing RISC cluster density.
Lightroom not fast enough? Just add a few more cores - would probably work for anything except Lightroom 4 :-)
To answer OP's question: No I dont think the MP will be retired. I think the current iMac performance is incredible but I think the next generation on MP's will be off the dial good.
