Thoughts?
I will wait till the specs and price are out. Neat design but I am not so sure how expandable the GPU will be on this thing. Size wise at 1/8th the size that is a pretty small footprint for sure. It will be interesting to see how this goes.
Answer, it won't be expandable. The GPU is what it is, Thunderbolt 2 to external PCIe boxes will be your route to expandability
Looks impressive. It obviously won't be anywhere near as expandable as the old model, but truthfully most of the size of the old model had to do with crazy cooling and airflow space to keep the thing from overheating. With the new tech they're including in this new model, it makes sense they were able to shrink it down considerably. Apple has learned a lot from their laptop and Mac mini product lines.
Anyway, call me surprised that Apple actually chose to finally give some love to the video and digital editing crowd. AIO's like IMacs are great machines, but most graphics/video folks like to have their own displays and at least some expandability.
All I know is, my back will be very happy when I start deploying these instead of the trucks I have now. Granted we've been moving most of our creatives over to 15" Retinas now.
I can't wait to roll one of these out. Literally!
Also - this: 
This is Apple giving the finger to actual power users. Time to re-evaluate Apple workstation deploys, since there is no nothing they can do that a Dell Precision can't.
Yep and screwed me over with no extra internal storage. Had a nice setup with fstab and user data on a separate disk. Security reasons at our place means no users have access to external media!
Cheers Apple!
Yep and screwed me over with no extra internal storage.
tkimpton from I can see you should be able to have 2 msata storage devices internally. One mounted on each GPU. It's not great, but it is an extra storage device.
I'm not going to scream too loudly just yet. While my gut is trying to fight it's way to my keyboard and rail against what looks like the reinvention of the lamented apple cube, I have very high hopes for Thunderbolt 2 externals. Now we just have to see them.
it's frustrating that apple is going to external everything. Yes teh devices look pretty with nothign connection, but it looks HORRIBLE with the cables plugged in...
In my case at any given time I have: Power, Ethernet dongle, HDMI to mDP, mDP, and at least one if two USB.
... nah, just lay it down like a small portable heater on your desk. The cut a hole in said desk to run the wires through. ;-)
we've decided to get cushions for these and replace our desk chairs with the new Mac Pros 
.... but then you'd always get hot ass chair :/
@acdesigntech - Now when you rotate in your chair the ports light up!
I have only one question: Will It Blend?
This is exactly the device I anticipated that they'd build. Well, other than the shape.
How many people need all of the expansion slots? How many people need *internal* storage? How many people need optical drives?
Thing is, for those who need expansion cards, or lots of storage, you will have tons of Thunderbolt options for storage systems and expansion chassis. You won't pay a performance penalty w/Thunderbolt 2. For those that just need a small, computationally-intensive box, you're all good AND you're not paying the price in terms of desk space, heat, power consumption, etc.
I don't understand the angst here. Apple has been on the leading edge of moving away from old tech like floppy drives, optical media, and spinning HD's; this just continues the trend.
I've seen a few developers who have had access to early machines post, and they claim these machines just absolutely scream. I think pro users, if they can get beyond the form factor change/lack of internal expandability, will be extremely happy with them.
@RobertHammen - Very well said and echoes my thoughts as well. I don't really understand the teeth gnashing going on here and on other boards, except to say that its primarily coming from IT geeks and not the actual users this is targeted at.
How anyone couldn't see that Apple would go in this direction (assuming they even did at all) given the history of their products over the last 5+ years is beyond me. This was designed to be forward looking, just like Apple has been doing now for some time. They don't hold onto the past and internal HDDs and expansion cards are the past folks. If we've learned anything from Apple its that we need to expect the unexpected and learn to adapt. Either that or move to the avalanche of crappy choices from Windows box makers (and have fun managing them!)
But, there are just some folks that are content with hating on Apple no matter what they do I guess.
I said it before and I'll say it again, I'm shocked really that Apple even developed another Mac Pro. I had written the line of for dead, so I'm pleasantly surprised by this announcement. It fills a gap between those not wanting something as simple and underpowered as the Mac mini, and not wanting an AIO like the iMac nor a laptop.
I just wish they developed it for a server environment (possibly even with a rack mountable option), not to look like a damned trash can. Any who, I AM happy they revived it.
It could be dead...
So yes I am glad they put some time into it and kept it alive.
I just wish this was one apple computer where they could have left function, accessibility, and upgradability as the number one priority instead of design.
I think every one would have been happy if they made the current mac pro a bit smaller and had a rack able solution.
Think about it..
Size of a 2u server version or desktop
Thunderbolt added
Still have space for different video cards and hard drives and a RAID card.
How could any one not be happy about that ?
Heck i think people would have been happy if they just kept upgrading the CPU architecture of the current mac pro and added thunderbolt. :(
As we saw with the Xserve, the market share potential of IT and/or AV geeks who would buy an expandable minitower is much, much smaller than that of people who are interested in this new form factor. Not enough return for the investment. For the subset of folks that need the internal expandability, you will enjoy your external Thunderbolt 2-connected storage or PCIe enclosure...
Remember, Apple is not an enterprise company...
Don't be surprised if you start to see RAIS offerings... ;)
I really don't know why anyone is surprised at the removal of internal expansion. It's been Apple's MO from the beginning.
I think we all new deep down is was going that way, we just didnt want to believe it.
Oh well.. We will just need to adapt and change as usual.
As least we kept on our toes and the majority of changes are improvements and they out weigh the bad stuff.
Feel sorry for our windows techies, everyone here is getting sick of Windows and are moving to Mac, snigger snigger :)
That's ok mate. I've already achieved my aim of having our mac backend better than the Windows backend :D
And i'm not done yet ...
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