Jon Alper's probably insufficiently humble opinion

For this to be of any use to anyone, we need to start from assumptions:

• You want, and are fortunate enough to be able to afford, a Mac Pro 2019
• You have some idea how you plan to use it today and  for the depreciation life of the machine. (Three years. If you can’t claw enough value from it in three years, don’t buy it though it will likely serve well for a lot longer. yes even if Apple goes ARM which is a topic for another day.)
• You want to make the most economical and future-flexible choices

This is not something to read if you’re in any of the ‘not for you’ camps discussed in the June 9th 2019 post below.

So, all that out of the way to stave off as much of the Twitter assault as possible, what follows are very much opinion-driven recommendations for how to buy your Mac Pro. Experienced opinion but not science.

We’ll need to wait for benchmarks if we need science but most of the benchmark stories you’ll read and YouTube videos you watch over the next few weeks will be problematic. They’ll compare to AMD CPUs or i9 machines. The AMD thing is a fantasy now and, in my best judgment, forever on the Mac. There could be an exclusivity agreement with Intel but there’s also years of optimizing macOS and apps for Intel. As they say in mob movies, fuhgeddaboudit. The i9 comparison is specious. There’s enough of the market for Mac Pro that wants or needs the ECC RAM and PCI slots that if you want an i9-based Mac, you’ll have to lobby Apple for an ‘xMac’ but confusing that, sadly still mythical, Mac with this one is pointless. That said, saying an 2019 iMac is faster is also ill-informed. Unless Apple lied when they promised thermally unconstrained performance in Mac Pro, no i9 Mac will survive the sort of abuse that this machine will take with a smile. Can an i9 iMac out-bench Mac Pro core for core? Sure. Can it outperform one for the workloads Mac Pro was built for? No. The benchmarks that will confirm or correct the following recommendations are real world application tests and those will be a while coming because the people equipped to properly do those benchmarks across multiple configs and with real sample projects have other work to do instead.

if you need a Mac Pro, decide what your main use-case is and then read through the following and make your best guess. When the machine arrives, pound on it and if it’s not right, return it. Activity Monitor and in-app profiling tools will help you validate your choices.

The following is written from the perspective of somebody specifying Mac Pro primarily for industrial video production and still photo manipulation with relatively light use of 3D and Music apps. Industrial video production, not cinema and not VFX.

CPU

For many users (who need a Mac Pro), the 16 core option (+$2,000 over base) will be a sweet spot; a compromise between scaling up multi-core performance and not unduly reducing single core performance. A case could be made that even assuming linear scaling with additional cores (and it’s not linear) that the $,1000 12 core option is a better value but, remember there isn’t likely going to be any officially supported after market CPU upgrade option in the future. This hasn’t been an option since PowerPC Macs had CPUs on daughter cards and Apple got sued for not making first party CPU upgrades available. Beyond that, there is no certainty Intel will release any future CPUs with the LGA-3647 socket compatible with this board. So, make your CPU choice (your whole Mac Pro choice really) with the expectation you’ll never be able to replace the CPU with any Apple sanctioned/supported upgrade. If you know your workflows are highly multi-threaded (likely because you’re writing the code for your own work or you have one vertical market app you know to be optimized for it) then you may want to consider the more expensive options but they are a niche within a niche. A niche Apple has neglected for years but who will be a, for this class of machine, a sizable market.

The 8 Core option really doesn’t seem worth it unless you know you’re primary load is GPU intensive or you’re solving another problem (Production rack mounting for audio work, DIT etc.) because it’s not going to beat the 12 core in single-threaded workflows.

GPU

While this was said at the release of the dual GPU 2013 Mac Pro and never really came to pass, there are indications now that GPU will become better utilized in macOS across a broader selection of apps. This optimism comes from recent updates to Apple’s own pro-apps and announcements of third party updates at WWDC.

Several use cases for Mac Pro suggest that the entry level Radeon Pro 580X with 8GB of GDDR5 memory will save you at least $2,400 with no meaningful downsides. If you’re a developer of utility and productivity applications (as opposed to 3D or graphics apps) for Apple OS’s, overspending on the GPU isn’t worth it. If your work is data analysis, if the Mac will be deployed as a server, if you’re setting up a Logic Pro, ProTools or other music workstation, overspending on GPU would be pointless.

If your plans for Mac Pro include video editing, general purpose media work or still photography, the more performant and video RAM endowed Radeon Pro W5700X Apple says is coming soon is available when you order yours, you may want to make extra investment over the Radeon Pro 580x if it’s affordable for you. [@RichzardTaylorTV notes that only the Vega MPX modules support Infinity Fabric Link]

A gaming GPU with no MPX module installed at all might seem a missing option but remember, for the Thunderbolt ports on the top and the back of the included Apple i/o card to work, you need at least one MPX GPU installed to supply them with Display Port and, for Apple to sell this as a ‘gaming machine’ would be absurd on its face. So, want to do some gaming on it in your free time? Stick in a gaming card and plug an extra monitor into that to frag your friends.

If you plan to do a lot with 3D, AfterEffects, Motion, DaVinci Resolve etc. the higher end GPU options will matter more (or, cryptocurrency mining but if you’re into that, you…well yeah, you be you). From a ‘I need lots of GPU and to keep as many slots open as I can because I need them for other things’ perspective, the $5,200 Radeon Pro Vega II Duo option is your best bet. If you don’t need the slots, you may find the two Radeon Pro Vega II MPX Modules option is slightly more performant because each card will have a full 16x PCI slot to feed it.   (Yes, they can be linked with an Infinity Fabric Link connector external to the cards and it’s included if you spec two cards) The catch is, you’ll have no MPX slot left for, say, a Promise Pegasus R4i. This may not be much of a loss or it may be a showstopper. Promise makes some very useful DAS arrays, their performance is not bus limited. This is to say, more drives (assuming HDDs) in the array will perform meaningfully better and, even with 8 drives in such an array, you wouldn’t saturate (exceed the capacity of) a Thunderbolt 3 connection. So, unless you need the storage to be internal more than you need speed (DIT rigs, audio production with huge sample, project and audio track loads in mobile setups for example could be good use cases for R4i) you probably won’t need the extra MPX slot.  

Finally, it’s not clear yet that the external Infinity Fabric link connectors bundled with each card sold after market by Apple will allow dissimilar cards to be connected. In other words, while two of either of the offered cards can connected to the same card if you buy one now and one later, it’s not yet clear whether you can connect a single Pro Vega II with a Pro Vega II Duo. So, if you realistically anticipate a two Pro Vega II Duo configuration is in your future, safest bet is to buy one now and not assume you can add one later and link it with a single chip Pro Vega II. 
Otherwise, a single Pro Vega II seems a reasonable choice for the sake of CPU/GPU balance.

 

SSD

According to https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210556 you can have Apple replace the SSD modules after market. The cost for this is unclear. Also unclear is whether there will be replacement SSD modules available from third parties. It may be that the T2 chip precludes this option or it may be that Apple won’t sell them for end user installation because they believe the process too complex (or just intrinsically data destructive, see T2). I am aware of no successful SSD upgrade for iMac Pro and that machine appears to use a similar approach.

With this in mind, the $400 1TB option should be considered a minimum option. This both because, aside niche use cases (certain server uses for example) 256GB is simply too little space on the most high speed internal bootable storage option currently available. Also, because the 1TB option uses two modules and the 256 (presumably) only one, it will be more performant. Arguably, for most general purpose use-cases contemplated here, the 4TB (or even the not yet available 8TB option) is your best bet. If you’ll be using the Mac for video editing, while it’s unlikely you’ll be able to fit all your media on the internal SSD, you will likely want to use it as your scratch/render drive for best performance. These two internal modules are the fastest storage you’ll ever likely have in or connected to your 2019 Mac Pro. Minimizing latency and disk contention by having cache and render files on this fast internal disk space with your media stored on a NAS, SAN or DAS RAID will make for the best performance. Indulge to the capacity of your budget when it comes to SSD.

RAM

The Mac Pro has six channels to access RAM and, ideally, you want to have all six channels in use and each channel filled with a pair of identical DIMMs. You must have four channels in use. The Mac will perform better if you use all six memory channels. There are specific guidelines for mixing DIMMs of different sizes (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210103 ) but you cannot mix the RDIMMs that ship with all Mac Pro CTO options below 384 GB with the LRDIMMs that ship with 384GB, 768GB, and 1.5TB options. So, if you imagine ever needing to exceed 384GB in total, it’s to your advantage to do so at initial purchase. For info on RDIMM vs LRDIMM see: https://www.dasher.com/server-memory-rdimm-vs-lrdimm-and-when-to-use-them/

Apple doesn’t design the way RAM must be installed. That’s an Intel-driven operating condition. Apple does have a nice GUI tool to help you get the placement right. The ‘where’s the 128 gig option?’ question is answered by the fact that there’s no such thing as a 21 and 1/3 GB DIMM and Apple doesn’t want somebody buying that much RAM to have reduced performance by offering a 4*32GB option. If you want to get every cycle of performance you can get from the CPU and don’t want to replace, merely add more RAM later, the trick is trying to make choices now that get you what you know you need and give you the room to go to a max you anticipate needing later with a single upgrade.

Arguably, you should consider 48GB the minimum recommended CTO config from Apple because the 32GB option is four 8GB sticks which won’t use all six of the available memory channels and, therefore, will be come with a speed penalty as well.  If you know you can get by on 48GB of RAM now and can’t imagine ever needing more than 96GB, just buy 48GB now.

Beyond 48GB, the question gets more complicated. The Apple tech document linked above expands on the above with caveats you should be mindful of when configuring your Mac to order and we’ll go over what some of them mean here. 

The guidelines for mixing capacities is to have lower capacity DIMMs (in identical pairs) from lowest memory channel to highest capacity in highest channel number. There is likely some smaller performance penalty for unequal capacity channels though not as severe as simply not using channel six at all (4 DIMMs) 

Since 384GB (12*32GB RDIMMS) seems to be a sweet-spot config for demanding media production configs, the 192GB config at purchase and an additional 192GB (six 32GB DIMMs) later may be a good compromise. 

Many will argue getting the lowest config from Apple and buying third party RAM (from reputable vendors) will be much cheaper than paying Apple’s prices for RAM. This is a solid argument and one often put forth by ‘old folks’ like me who used to do this all the time as a matter of course. The problem is, if you have support issues with your Mac, one of the first suggestions Apple support will make during troubleshooting is to pull any 3rd party RAM and test again. If your basic day to day work simply can’t happen without enough RAM, don’t put yourself in a position where your whole Mac is down waiting for replacement 3rd party RAM. The balancing act to do here is to buy what you MUST have to function when you first get your Mac, know how much RAM you anticipate upgrading to later and and plan  accordingly.

 

Afterburner

Afterburner is a 16x PCI Express card containing an FPGA (Floating Programmable Gate Array) currently supported to accelerate the decoding (not encoding) of up to 6 streams of 8K ProRes RAW or up to 23 streams of 4K ProRes RAW. (More if it’s just HD and traditional Pro Res). It’s priced at $2,000 .
In deciding whether to invest in this card, remember what it doesn’t do:

• Encode. While your timeline containing ProRes footage will have decode accelerated by AfterBurner, the final encode of your exported file is not accelerated by Afterburner. While there may well be an incremental benefit to export performance since decode workload is lifted from the CPU, AfterBurner does not accelerate encode itself.
• Mitigate the need for disk i/o for all those streams. You can’t, just because you have an AfterBurner card, edit 8k ProRes RAW. You need sufficient space on sufficiently fast storage. The cost of that storage will quickly dwarf the cost of Afterburner itself. 

Afterburner only mitigates the decode burden on the CPU and decode, all other things being equal, isn’t an issue except in the most demanding workflows. Remember, one of the design goals of ProRes was lightweight decode. Workflows relying on Pro Res RAW may be exactly the ones to most immediately benefit from Afterburner since the decode load of RAW decode (and rendering) is higher than plain ole 10 Bit 4:2:2. 

So, for the time being, unless you’re bringing this Mac into an existing and well appointed high resolution multi stream ProRes workflow, or are planning a near term move to ProRes RAW there’s no advantage to buy Afterburner as a CTO option.

However, lifting from the piece I wrote at announcement:

“while it would be unwise to base purchasing decisions on this, Greg Joswiak and Craig Federighi had some tantalizing things to say on the live WWDC episode of The Talk Show with John Gruber. Specifically they said “it can be reprogrammed.” Then Craig, “There’s more to come….I mean, I’m not announcing anything but.. one could imagine.” Oooh let’s imagine! Reprogrammed for audio DSP doing for Logic what AVID’s HDX cards do for ProTools? Or, completely out of the media universe, a developer API to set it work on tasks like CoreML training? But hey, since we’re imagining, Joz also said, “in milliseconds.” Could one hope, one day, to buy an AfterBurner, or three, and have them dynamically re-assigned to accelerate different tasks? More from Joz: “It can literally process six billion pixels a second” and Craig, “virtually like dedicated hardware speed.” one can imagine a lot indeed.”

Wheels

There are very few scenarios where the wheels are a good idea let alone worth the money, but for those scenarios, they’re ideal. If you’re working in a facility where regularly moving your Mac Pro from room to room (suite to suite) will enable it to be more useful, then buy the wheels. If you’re moving it from venue to venue, don’t. Buy a slipover flight case (of the style often used for ‘Combo’ guitar amps) where the Mac would sit permanently in the shallow tray of a road case you can put a cover over and latch. Pictures you may have seen of Mac Pro being wheeled up a truck ramp on its own wheels are pictures of a Mac Pro that won’t last  very long.[ UPDATE ; The feet are removable. It’s not clear whether the wheels would be a screw in replacement but this suggests you might not need to swap the frame after all: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Mac+Pro+2019+Teardown/128922]

Rack Enclosure

While not available yet and uncertain, there are indications from the pictures Apple has published that the cooling for the rack mountable enclosure is the same as the cooling for the desktop, which is to say, quiet. Generally speaking, rack mountable computers intended for a data center are loud. Brutally loud, Hearing damage loud. This enclosure appears to be designed for a production rack which is an entirely different beast, That’s not to say it can’t be used in a data center with typical ‘hot aisle/cold aisle’ design (it vents front to back) rather, that if it is as quiet as a desktop, it can go in the rack under your tube compressors in the studio or in the shock mounted rack behind your Hammond B3 and Vintage Oberheim Matrix 12 on stage. This needs verification but if things are as they appear, a lot of people will be very happy. Do be sure your rack is well ventilated.

Random additional notes and mysteries from the last post are resolved:

• The ‘second slot’ in line with the MPX module’s slots were described as ‘keeping your PCI lanes’ in the last post and this, in at least some cases is true to the extent that you get them as additional Thunderbolt Ports on the back of the module but the main value you get from them is that they supply power to the cards and allow the card to provide display support to the top and Apple i/o Card Thunderbolt ports. 
• You need 12 Amps out of the wall (In the US and Canada, Brits and others with 240V standards need 6 Amps) for this Mac and that’s not so easy to count on as you might think especially with UPS. Plan for it. Pro Display XDR current requirements aren’t listed.
• The wheels seem to be ‘at one with the steel frame’. If you want ‘em, buy them when you buy your Mac or expect to have it go to the Genius for a replacement of the frame. (Apple does appear to offer this option https://www.apple.com/shop/mac/mac-accessories/mac-components)
• The latch near the internal USB-A port unlocks the PCI card and MPX module retention bar. In addition, there are levers on at least some MPX modules that act as ejectors in a manner to DIMM ejectors but on the module itself.
• The two latches near the RAM on the back side of the board unlatch the covers to the RAM.
• The WiFi and Bluetooth antennas appear to be under plastic ‘trim’ around the handles on top.
• The mysterious power connectors on the board are to support third party PCI cards and Apple is even selling a Belkin cable kit to use them.
• Apple’s MPX modules (and other components) are available at launch. This is a very big deal. It indicates a meaningful commitment to the nature of this Mac. 
• The ‘plates’ that span the gaps between the MPX modules are Infinity Fabric Link connectors and modules you buy after market include them. Still TBD is whether they can be used to link two dissimilar MPX modules.
• The not yet available rack mountable chassis option costs $500 and includes a rail kit.
• The Promise Pegasus J2i could turn out ti be a very handy option if, as seems likely the case, the two internal SATA connectors are each on their own bus. Doubly so if Promise ends up offering an empty option one can install SSDs into. Internal storage where you can keep frequently used bumpers, branding and the like. especially if, with two buses, it can be set up software RAID 0, will help keep your internal, faster, SSD from filling up.

This article will be updated as we learn more, and my inevitable errors are called out. Meaningful editorial change will be noted, typos and awkward wording, just fixed on the sneak.

For more about The 2019 Mac Pro check out @RichzardTaylorTV on Twitter and at https://fcpx.tv

[Posted and edited with MarsEdit]

 

At WWDC 2019 Keynote, Tim Cook telegraphed an intro video for the new Mac Pro so many of us had been waiting for with reference to  “a product missing from our  lineup.” The video ran and there it was, black, curved and reminding everyone who’s been looking forward to a new Mac Pro of the first thing you saw before scrolling down the old product page for the 2013 Mac Pro. A reminder of just why we ended up so unhappy with how long it had been since Apple had, as they said, painted themselves into a thermal corner.

Apple trolled us all with those first few frames of video.

 

 

Gloriously!

Minimizing the compromises while maximizing flexibility is a the core design theme of this Mac. It’s a profoundly different direction from the 2013 Mac Pro in all the best and most unexpected ways. Arguably, even if you never buy one, it’s an expensive (for Apple to make, not just for customers to buy) message from Apple practically shouting: ‘’We’re committed to the Mac, we’re listening to our customers and we understand some of them need something wholly unlike an iMac let alone a laptop.”

 

It’s not a sports car. This is realization of the 2010 Steve Jobs’ quote: “When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy.” This truck is a thundering, earth mover of a truck.

instead of another curvaceous exercise in impressive but ultimately misguided innovation like the 2013 ‘Trash Can’ Mac Pro (the 2013 Mac Pro got more of a bad rap than it really deserved, I manage a bunch of them pounding away at multi-camera ProRes 422 HD in Final Cut X, occasionally 4k, 8 hours a day for years with very, very few problems), what we got as the video played on was what most of us had never dreamt we would and many of us said we wanted. A cheese grater! As David Byrne said, “it’s cool, it’s a multipurpose shape. A box”. A monument to form following function. A full capitulation by Apple to the realities of physics purely in service to the user instead of a flexing of aesthetic design muscle. A new enclosure design that put functionality first for the first time since the PowerMac G5.

This design is near perfect given the goals and constraints outside of Apple’s control. Near, but more on that later, The entirety of the machines internals are accessible with a turn of a rotating latch on the top of the Mac that lets the user lift a machined aluminum sleeve off the top and expose all four sides of the internals. The two stainless steel handles are integral to the structure of the machine. When you lift by these handles, you’re lifting the entire machine by its very, very sturdy looking stainless steel skeleton and these handles, unlike the hand-goring handles of the G3 or the knife’s edge finger-severing handles of the original cheese grater case introduced with the PowerMac G5 and evolved through the 2012 Mac Pro, these are smooth, round and oh so very shiny. In order to present the balance one must to these sorts of articles I must point out a flaw or two with this enclosure.

It’s not black. It should be black. All the things should be black.You should look at them and ask yourself how much more black could they get and realize “None. None more black.”  It’s a rule.

On a more serious note, there has been concern expressed (First by Dr. Ian Cutress of AnandTech) that a lack of dust filtration behind the copious number of intricately machined speed holes (Yes it has speed holes, these help it go faster almost as much as a Type R badge would have) will lead to components overheating. While that’s true, dust accumulation does reduce a machine’s ability dissipate heat and crashy machines often do return to good behavior after a nice going over with compressed air, the same need arises with filters getting clogged. Given that, is dust ingress that big a concern given how easy it is open this Mac? Is the up to 300 cubic feet per minute of airflow this Macs fans move too windy for the dust bunnies to do anything but run scared?

The handles and feet, also mean it takes up more vertical space than housing its innards demand though the handles act as a roll bar of sorts to protect connectors at the top.

Why worry about that extra space taken up? The case doesn’t lend itself to being rack-mountable and that’s a deployment approach many of those who’ll need this machine will really want to take. Not just as servers in data centers but in equipment racks both built into studios and installed in portable shock protected road cases.  Would I have loved to see this machine with the handles on the front and rear and removable top and bottom plates to expose screw holes for mounting hardware? Damned skippy! Would there be some remarkably effective but space-wasteful third party solution for this like there has been every time Apple’s ignored this use case before? Sure!

But…

 

The 2019 Mac Pro will be made available in an alternative rack mountable chassis, rails and all by the look of it 4U tall. While the dream of a single enclosure readily adaptable to rack, tower or desktop uses didn’t happen, the availability of an Apple option for rack mounting at all was truly shocking news and an indication of the profound influence of the Pro Workflow Team at Apple (The link previous goes to a great @panzer article on Tech Crunch).

The Mac Pro 2019 seems to have delivered exactly as we’d never have dared hope for; an extremely flexible, fast, customizable machine remarkably free of compromises in any axis you care to measure, including price.

 

 

Those of us who’ve relied on Apple’s ‘big iron’ since the beginning had likely given up on ever seeing something like this. Not seeing something like this again, seeing something like this ever. This isn’t just another example of Apple saying ”It is the most powerful Mac we have ever created” and it being ‘true’ because it includes the latest chip that’s faster than the last and some wonderful new feature like a Retina display or controversial experiment like the TouchBar. This is the fastest, the most configurable, flexible, accessible, repairable and upgradable Mac ever made. And, it’s not, by far, the most expensive Mac they’ve ever sold, either. The Mac IIfx cost between ten and twelve thousand dollars, (1990 dollars. According to the US Department.of Labor, that top end Mac IIfx cost $39,416.14 in April 2019 dollars.)

So what do we get for a starting price of $5.999?

Power, Cooling and design theme

 

The power supply, sitting at the bottom of the machine is spec’d at 1.4kw peak power and sustained power of 1.28kw. It’s not completely clear if these wattage numbers reflect maximum load or maximum current draw but, either way, this machine offers, probably almost down to the tens of watts, every bit of electricity it can to power itself and whatever customizations you choose. Any beefier a power supply and it would push a 15A wall outlet far too close to its limit to be safely plugged in anywhere but the newest home construction and office spaces. While some servers and machines intended for more industrial applications can include beefier supplies, to push this Mac’s PSU that far would have made an already niche product simply unavailable to many users even if they had the money to buy it.

We only know some of how this power can be distributed and, if you make a choice that exceeds the limits, how the Mac will respond. Apple states “over 300 watts” is available to the CPU but the load each of the various CPU options will actually draw is unknown. Intel rates the TDP (Thermal Design Power) in watts but as a measure of heat not electricity. How much electrical load will be variable both by the workload on the CPU and from whatever decisions Apple makes in the way they set the machine up to manage it so what the actual power demands the CPU options make is still unclear.

In all aspects of the machine’s design from power, cooling, CPU options, storage, graphics, RAM and other cards, Apple seems to have pushed to limits imposed by reality, not design aesthetic akin to the way the PSU is limited to the power limited you can get out of the wall.

Starting with the fans, really, the whole cooling architecture, Apple made a point of stating that that there is more cooling available than necessary and that this cooling is quiet enough to be as quiet as the iMac Pro when sitting under a desk “in typical load conditions.” There’s some hedging there with both the ‘under a desk’ and ‘typical’ caveats, but mention was made of 12db in one interview. Three, front mounted fans draw in cool air and blow hot air out the back across the CPU, slots, the whole front side of the board. The back side of the board is half obscured by a large blower and ducting which would appear to cool the RAM and SSD modules. The cooling system has been said to be able to move 300 cubic feet of air per minute. How it sounds doing that is yet another open question.

Storage

 

The internal SSD modules are some form of NVMe sticks, presumably configured in a RAID 0-like manner for maximum throughput like the iMac Pro with a metal cover more similar in appearance to the SSDs used in the 2013 Mac Pro which are upgradable with third party solutions.

 

 

Marco Arment (who was present at the hands-on area at WWDC and apparently, asked) said on the Accidental Tech Podcast 329: Mac Pro Day that these are upgradable in the 2919 Mac Pro but there has been some concern he may have been misinformed and the T2 chip may preclude upgrades.

The good news is, this uncertainty doesn’t apply to the overall question of aftermarket internal storage in the 2019 Mac Pro. Two options have been announced and at least a third is almost certainly coming. Promise Technology has announced two products to add spinning disk but one can easily imagine 2.5” SSDs being an option in place of the platters. The Pegasus R41 uses an MPX Module Slot (more on those later) to PCI attach a four disk hardware RAID and the Pegasus J2i offers two bays (one comes loaded) SATA drive bracket which connects to the two internal, presumably, SATA III ports and power inside the Mac Pro enclosure. A tab relief and two mounting screw holes to match the tab in Promise’s J2i marketing image are visible in the top plate of the Mac Pro frame above the SATA ports on the logic board. Beyond what we know, there is at least one more likely approach to adding DAS (Direct Attached Storage) beyond the obvious Thunderbolt and USB options; PCIe cards with nVME slots.

My hunch is, Marco was told correctly but that Apple won’t sell them after market so it’ll come down to if/when third parties step up.

A USB-A port sits inside the machine on the same panel as the SATA ports and (again presumably) SATA power outlet. In a testament to the presence and thoughtfulness of Apple’s Pro Workflows Team, the stated purpose of this port is to plug in a copy protection dongle inside the machine where it’s less likely to grow legs or be snapped off which are two of the almost endless joys provided for the pleasure of paying customers to copy protect their high end software.

As a side note, as annoying as dongles are, they are in almost every way preferable to other copy protections involving online activation and node locking which are abusive in the extreme and create administrative agony for anyone trying to manage these machines in a production environment.

Adjacent to this USB-A port is a mysterious latch. I initially speculated that this was to lock the copy protection dongle in place when dragging (Or rolling! It’s the third Apple computer [but the first Mac] made to offer wheels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Network_Server) the machine around to keep it from rattling out of its connector. Matt Christensen (@_mchristensen) pointed out on Twitter that this latch likely moves the long black rail in front of the PCI slots to lock and unlock cards that provide a hook for this purpose on their board edges. Which or both functions, (something else?) this latch serves is yet another item for the TBD list.

 

PCI Slots

 

This Mac has one more slot than the “slottiest” Mac in Apple History, the Mac IIfx. (6 NuBus Slots and 1 Processor Direct slot). The 2019 Mac Pro has 8 PCI slots. Not one, or two or three.. four stones!.. Err.. Eight slots! PCIe gen 3 slots. 

One half length 4 Lane Slot is used for the Apple i/o card (presumably standard on the base config). This card provides two Thunderbolt 3 and two USB-A ports which appear to be USB 3.0 given Apple stipulating 5gbs. Because it’s a 4 lane slot, it’s likely that the Thunderbolt 3 ports share a bus and share bandwidth with the two USB-A ports as well. The Thunderbolt 3 ports carry 10 Gb/s USB-C as well. DisplayPort for these Thunderbolt ports is routed through the system from any of the three available graphics card options. In addition, this card provides a 3.5mm headphone jack with headset support so a mic input as well. None of the combination digital optical and analog audio magic we’ve seen in the past are here and it’s not clear how port will negotiate line levels, in or out.

This all being on a card seems (again according to Marco) to be another example of Apple leaving the decisions about where to compromise up to the user as much as possible. If you don’t need these ports (there are two more Thunderbolt 3/USB-C/Display port connectors permanently installed into the top of the case), apparently, you can pull (or not spec?) the Apple i/o card and use the slot for something else. If you’re running a recording studio, this audio jack will not put your oars in the water. You’ll have some other audio (and MIDI) interface instead. The ability for the end user to forego this card to put those four lanes to other use sacrifices back panel Thunderbolt but at the very least, Apple’s preserved flexibility for their own future designs (and repairs) by putting this i/o in a card. It’s unknown whether you could, for reasons unfathomable, buy a second one of of these Apple i/o boards. (even if so, are there limitations to display port availability in other slots?)

Assuming you choose the single slot AMD Radeon Pro 580X GPU card option and leave the Apple i/o card in place If, for example, you’re more focused on audio or crunching big data than you are graphics, that’s six slots left! 

The whole “Six Slots” thing was a big deal in 1999, Avid showed Apple the door for Media Composer support on Mac because Apple wouldn’t ship a six slot Mac, The last and only ’six slot (PCI) Mac’, the 9600 retired in November 1997.  These were dark times for the Mac video professional and Apple as a whole. A former employer was not one bit pleased and MacWeek was a buzz with doom editorial. (Any possibility that the impending release of Final Cut Pro in 1999 might have contributed to AVID’s six slotted temper tantrum is pure speculation)

Recalling that bit of history, there is a delicious irony in that if you’re more focused on audio or crunching big data than you are video and choose the AMD Radeon Pro 580X and leave in the Apple i/o card, this Mac is the first computer to support 6 Avid ProTools HDX DSP cards. (No word from AVID yet as to the impact of this machine on their other product plans.) 

This scenario, the decision to use six slots for AVID HDX boards is an example of where, because of the truly remarkable flexibility of this design, the decisions you make when configuring this machine will be highly dependent on the compromises you need to make to have it serve your intended purposes. We’re back to compromises again, but thanks to Apple’s choices, those compromises are overwhelmingly left to the user rather than predetermined by the design of the Mac itself. 

Card counts and lanes. The processor (assuming I’ve guessed correctly) supports a total of 64 PCI lanes. So, while the total number of slots and the marked number of lanes totals 92 the CPU only offers 64. That’s 28 lanes you can’t use. (Installing a 4 lane card in a 16 lane slot works the reverse sometimes works but slower)) The supporting Intel Chipset (C620?) provides 20 more PCI lanes but of those are likely consumed by the two network interfaces, built in Thunderbolt and the two built in SSDs and, perhaps WiFi. The Bluetooth (via USB) and SATA (and the chipset supports SATA III) and some of the other stock USB is provided from the support chip directly without using PCI lanes.

The reason the listed numbers of lanes exceeds the total is so you’re not stuck wanting three 16 two cards and only having two16 lane slots but if your card choices need all the lanes in their slot you’re ‘borrowing them’ from elsewhere.  Don’t let this freak you out though. Those AVID HDX cards are each 4 lanes. An AJA KONA 5 needs 8 lanes. (And by way of putting the Mac Pro’s price in perspective costs $2,995). All this perhaps a  backward way of suggesting many of the cards you may end up sticking in a 16 lane slot won’t use all 16 lanes.

Graphics

 

The base configuration’s graphics card is the aforementioned double-wide card that consumes one of the 8 PCI slots. This “great all around graphics card”, the Radeon Pro 580x, routes four display port signals to the internal Thunderbolt ports, has two HDMI 2.0 ports and 8GB GDDR5 video memory and provides 5.6 teraflops single precision, 36 compute units and 2304 stream processors. It should be assumed that no matter what other graphics card you choose to install (and Apple has explicitly said “the slot maintains compatibility with standard cards” and there are two 300w 8pin aux power connectors available and what looks to be some other unspecified smaller aux power port toward the front edge of the logic board) in the three remaining double wide, full length 16 lane slots, you will likely need to, and almost certainly want to leave one of Apple’s cards in place.

It should (perhaps must?) remain installed in order to provide display port to the Thunderbolt 3 ports on the Apple i/o card and the built in top mounted Thunderbolt 3 ports. How does it do that? The bottom and third from the bottom PCI slots are meant for what Apple calls an MPX module and the base Radeon Pro 580x is packaged as a ‘half height’ MPX Module. Each of the two MPX module bays (a full height MPX module is quadruple wide) has an extra connector on the card edge that fits into a second Apple specific slot in line with the PCI slot but further forward that carries display port, PCIe and delivers up to 500w of power. This card drives up to six 4K displays, two 5K displays, or two Pro Display XDRs.

Before you embark on the likely futile effort to figure out all of the many NVIDIA cards Apple didn’t choose to supply with this machine you believe are better and cheaper than Apple’s two higher-end MPX offerings, so you can complain about this Mac, you do, theoretically have the option to supply your own.Unless there’s a sudden detente between Apple and NVIDIA (seems highly unlikely) and/or that Apple opens the spec for the MPX Module, you’d likely leave the Apple card in place add a standard PCI NVIDIA card and rely on NVIDIA to build a Mac-supporting card that navigates this cooling airflow and maintain usable drivers. Absent any official detente, installing your own NVIDIA card with NVIDIA drivers seems like a recipe for all the fun Windows users enjoy dancing around with OS updates, GPU drivers and the uncertainties about which apps get worse and which get better depending on which GPU you choose.

The lower end of the other two MPX Module offerings at launch is an AMD Radeon Pro Vega II with 32GB of HBM2 Memory and 1TB/s (that’s big B Byte according to Apple’s specs) bandwidth, 64 Compute Units, 4096 stream processors, 14.1 teraflops of single precision or, if about half vague is cool with you, 28.2 teraflops of half precision. This is a ‘full wide’ MPX module so it will obscure one additional 16 Lane full length slot. This MPX Module features four Thunderbolt 3 Ports and one HDMI 2.0 port. Support for up to six 4K displays, two 5K displays, or two Pro Display XDRs. Apple notes that this “Full-height MPX Module fills an MPX bay and uses extra power and PCIe bandwidth” and this may help explain some of the additional mystery of that ‘other PCI slot with the extra pins” that, in part, defines the MPX module. It would seem that what Apple is saying with that caveat is that while it the full height module obscures one of the ‘normal’ PCI slots, you get some or all of the missing lanes back in the form of those four Thunderbolt 3 ports. If you get all 16 lanes you’ve covered up back? That’s up to four more Thunderbolt buses. Apple taketh away and Apple giveth back bigtime. A means to use a slot obscured by cooling for anything at all isn’t something I’ve seen on any other machine from anyone.

The top end graphics offering is an AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo. That would be two AMD Radeon Pro Vega II GPUs stacked up together in a quadruple wide trailer. And shacked up they are. The two GPU chips live side by each like two eggs on a pair of toast on the same board and are connected via what Apple (or is it AMD?) calls “Infinity Fabric Link” which they say connects the two GPUs at 84GB (big B bytes again) per second. “That’s five times faster than the PCI bus” Because the two of these chips writhing around in concert (or is it congress)  are under the same fabric sheets, they double the maximum pixels they can push to up to six 4K displays, three 5K displays, or two Pro Display XDRs. You can install two of them. How much power will be left for anything else adds to our list of open questions.

Regarding that NIVIDIA thing, in claiming ‘the worlds most powerful graphics card’ Apple said,Maxon tells Apple that Cinema 4D is “twenty percent faster  “than a Windows PC maxed out with three of the latest NVIDIA Quadra cards”. Not mentioned is whether this comparison needed two AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo cards and, yes the Mac Pro sports two.

Another enigma wrapped up in this box alongside an ambiguity or two is; what’s that connector on the other card edge of both of the two higher end MPX offerings? When describing Infinity Fabric Link during the WWDC  Keynote, John Ternus doubled the specs of the Duo module when he pointed out the Mac supported two of them. Is it possible this top connector allows the linking of two MPX Modules via Infinity Fabric? If so, do they both need to be the Duo? Can they be two of the single chip? One of each? People with soon-to-be-depleted-bank-accounts will want to know!

AfterBurner

 

Apple also announced another PCI card, the single slot AfterBurner, an FPGA (Field-programmable gate array) tuned for Pro Res and Pro Res RAW decode. For video folks on high end jobs, this could be a really huge deal.

If you’ve never explored Pro Res before and you’re a video editor, now is the time to go read up. Aside from Pro Res, Avid’s DNX is the only editing codec you should tolerate in your life unless you your camera both forces and justifies it’s native format. (There are some really good acquisition formats but not on cameras that don’t cost more-than-new-Mac-Pro money. (BMCC perhaps aside.)) Apple states the Mac Pro with Afterburner can play back 3 streams of 8k Pro Res RAW or 12 streams of 4k. AVID editors notwithstanding, If your work demands this, the Mac Pro with AfterBurner is a no brainer. What’s still to be determined is the value if you’re not pushing that hard. A 2013 Mac Pro can happily chew up and spit out more than 3 streams of HD Pro Res 422 all day with fast enough storage. Does AfterBurner meaningfully raise the HD stream count? Does it accelerate ProRes Encode? (AppleInsider says yes  to encode but every person Apple to mention it that I’ve heard has only said playback (decode)). Will your workflow and storage infrastructure mean you’re more bound by file i/o performance than Pro Res decode? What are the AfterBurner benefits relative to the benefits of raising the core count of the CPU you select? To put it another way, just because you’re a Final Cut Pro X shop with the wisdom to shoot, edit and master in Pro Res doesn’t mean your content and workflow won’t get all the benefit you can actually use from CPU and GPU without buying AfterBurner. Then again, if it’s twenty bucks, why the heck not? Pro Tip: Don’t expect it to cost $20 though it it’s not likely in the same cost brackets as the higher end MPX modules.

All these questions will need to wait until it’s benchmarked. But.. while it would be unwise to base purchasing decisions on this, Greg Joswiak and Craig Federighi had some tantalizing things to say on the live WWDC episode of The Talk Show with John Gruber. Specifically they said “it can be reprogrammed.” Then Craig, “There’s more to come….I mean, I’m not announcing anything but.. one could imagine.” Oooh let’s imagine! Reprogrammed for audio DSP doing for Logic what AVID’s HDX cards do for ProTools? Or, completely out of the media universe, a developer API to set it work on tasks like CoreML training? But hey, since we’re imagining, Joz also said, “in milliseconds.” Could one hope, one day, to buy an AfterBurner, or three, and have them dynamically re-assigned to accelerate different tasks? More from Joz: “It can literally process six billion pixels a second” and Craig, “virtually like dedicated hardware speed.” one can imagine a lot indeed.

I’ll take this whole imagining thing too many steps too far. Afterburner is shown slotting into what’s labeled as slot 5 16x. Does it need all 16 lanes? What, perhaps, could one do if these were installed in a Thunderbolt external PCI chassis?

Never buy any tool that can’t, out of the box, solve a problem for you but, what was said on the Talk Show points to some interesting possibilities. This, of course, assuming that any of these Mac Pro components, the graphics cards MPX modules, the i/o boards, or AfterBurner, are available after market or only at CTO time when buying the system. That uncertainty is substantial.

The potential though, if any of the above comes to pass starts looking quite interesting and this may be the sleeper bit of hardware news.

CPU

 

“To get the last ounce of performance out of this processor, we’re giving it over 300 watts of power and a massive heatsink for cooling. So this means it can run full unconstrained, All the time.” – John Ternus

 

By “that processor” we can assume Mr. Ternus was referring to the 28 Core model. How much CPU core count will matter for what you want to do with your Mac is an open question. Actually, it’s a whole bunch of them. Cost being the first. We don’t yet know which specific of the latest Xeon CPUs Apple has chosen but it seems likely to be from this bunch and the retail prices, for the CPU alone, run from the $749 Xeon W-3223 with 8 Cores to the $4,449 Xeon W-3275. There had been some very smart speculation from @octothorpe and @tankgrrl on Twitter that may indicate I have the wrong guess as to which chips Apple has chosen and, if they’re right, as they point out, it may be that the there are also motherboard variants depending on CPU chosen at config time. The question hangs on the number of memory channels being six for all chips offered or only four for one version of the 8 core chip people have speculated Apple may have chosen. The specifics are yet more questions we’ll need to wait for more answers before we start falling in love with a particular configuration. One hint that @octothorpe may be onto something is that the 32GB config in Apple’s specs page is set up as four 8GB DIMMs while the remaining memory options are groups of six sticks. It’s possible that even a six channel CPU may not require that all six channels have RAM available and only that balancing the channels equally optimizes RAM performance, The specifics of how best to populate DIMM slots is yet another open question.

 

 

Networking and More

 

 

Beyond the WiFi, two 10Gbps RJ45 ports beckon at the back of the machine adjacent to the power inlet port near the bottom. The flexibility you get with two ports is substantial. Local shared storage like a https://lumaforge.com/jellyfish on it’s own LAN and you can use the other port connected to a LAN segregated from your storage network to connect with collaborators from other departments (save every bit of 10Gbps Ethernet bandwidth for the shared storage, really, it’s a good idea). Of course, if you’re a Chrome user, you may find you need the 28 Core CPU option if you use more than one browser tab at a time. (An exaggeration of course but for lots of good reasons. don’t use Chrome)

While we’re on that side of the board, we have another few mysteries to ponder. For example, in the cooling discussion above we learned of three fans and one blower and a front to back airflow. The fans, perpendicular to the mother board cool CPU, cards and MPX modules and any of those additional storage options discussed above. The blower, ducted, blowing air in the same front to back direction but mounted parallel to the mother board on the RAM side. It’s clearly shown during the Keynote drawing air over the RAM slots but it also showcases two more mysteries. First, what is the hotspot shown near the center of the board? Seems likely to be Intel support chips for the CPU. Second, there appears to be a door. A rounded rectangle with two latches above the blower. One might speculate that this hides the WiFi 802.11 a/c (a/b/g and n compatible) and Bluetooth 5.0 hardware but the door, if it is a door, looks big for the job. It also raises yet another question. Where are the antennae?

It appears this Mac comes with yet another ‘sure to sell for insane amounts of money on eBay unless and until Apple makes them available for purchase separately” set of input devices. A full sized keyboard with correctly colored (black) keys and silver frame, a Magic Mouse 2 in silvered black, or a Magic Trackpad 2 also in silver and black. Being called a Magic Mouse 2 just as the current model is doesn’t paint a rosy picture for Apple finally putting the charging port in a saner location, where a mouses tail belongs).

Configuring yours

 

When it comes time to buy a few of these machines for the house, the yacht and the bunkhouse, the answers to the questions above (summarized below) should be matched against some very careful reflection about what work you’re planning to do with this beast of a machine.

 

Power Questions:
– How much power does the power supply deliver? Is 1.4Kw what it pulls from the wall or is it what you can expect to get out of it? (No power supply is 100% efficient.)
How much does the Mac pull from the wall? Yes really, you need to know. don’t bring it home to discover the outlet you have in mind shares a circuit breaker, or a fuse, with another room.
How big a UPS do you need?
– How much power do the various options actually consume? Just because an MPX Module has 500w available to it doesn’t mean the current ones on offer all pull 500w.
– What will the Mac do if you put too much load on the Power Supply. Did Apple get all Apple-y and implement a mechanism for you to troubleshoot it with a software integration?

RAM Questions:
– How must the RAM be installed to optimize performance? Is it so finicky it needs matched chips or not. If matched, how matched and all of them or just pairs in a channel?

AfterBurner Questions:
– If you’re considering AfterBurner, how much will it currently improve your workflow? Will your workflow evolve in the near term to benefit from AfterBurner? A shift in acquisition format to ProRes RAW could be a justification even at HD or 4k. This is a very different question from “How will AfterBurner evolve to support your workflows.” It’s desirable to assume it will but it doesn’t make fiscal sense to buy on hope, unless it’s surprisingly cheap and not available after market.

MPX Module (GPU) questions:
– Are you planning a graphics intensive use case or not so much? If so, how much? It seems likely that a AMD Radeon Pro Vega II is a sweet spot for general purpose media use. But again, the questions of what options will be available after market from Apple should impact your thinking and you should know what they are before you buy. If these cards will be available after market then maybe start as cheap as you can if you’re coming from older hardware. If there is an Infinity Fabric Link with some connector between AMD Radeon Pro Vega II modules, then start with one and add a second later as needed. If there’s no clear information from Apple about availability of components at retail and you can possibly afford it, spec the AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo because it may be the only chance you get to choose it.

CPU Questions:
– What are trusted benchmark sites saying after review models go out? By trusted I mean Ian Cutrress at AnandTech https://www.anandtech.com/Author/140 or the gang at ArsTechnica more than the sort of site that used to try and pitch you on the innovation of Power Computing Macs back in the day. What are the sweet spots for your use cases? Is an extra grand (or more) better spent on more cores, more GPU or an AfterBurner, or, fo that matter Apple SSD?

Enclosure Questions:
– If you’re not going into a datacenter, what is the rack mountable option like? Is it as quiet? Do your workloads and environment mean it would go into a rack behind your mix desk or in a road case with rails? Do you need the wheels? Bear in mind that while Doug Brooks, the Apple Product Manager for the new Mac Pro made a believable case on Mac Power Users case for the ruggedness of the design and value and use of the wheels, sliding the Mac across your flat and level workplace floor on the Apple wheels is something very, very, different from pushing it onto the lift gate of a truck. The latter, you want it in a proper road case.

The Random Head Scratchers:
– What’s the mystery latch do? The card lock? Sliding bar to catch the hook on many PCI cards? Lock in the USB-A stick? Both? Something else?
– Where are the WiFi and BlueTooth antennas?
– What’s the deal with those two 8 pin Power Connectors described and what’s up with what looks like two others, one adjacent to the SATA connectors? The other labeled 5-6?
– What, other than RAM does that blower keep cool?

And, maybe the least obvious and in some applications most important questions:How loud does it get when you make it beg for mercy?

Who is this Mac for and why all the hoopla?

 

So, who needs this Mac? As with any Apple product announcement the reactions span the gamut from giddy excitement to bitter resentment. A lot of why this range of reactions is in play with this product is that it’s called “Pro”. It’s that damned word, “pro”.  I’m a Pro so if it’s not for me, I’m personally insulted. I’m a pro in a field other than the ones this machine is for. The work I do on my computer is a sideline or hobby but I am a pro because I get paid to do it. To understand the Mac Pro 2019, we need to define what the “Pro” needs and that’s no easy trick but it boils down to this: A Pro, as defined by this product, is somebody who needs to do an absurd amount of math on a ridiculous amount of data as fast as possible at sustained levels day in and day out.

A brain surgeon is a pro, she doesn’t need a Mac Pro. A photographer can be a pro and much as we may feel like the thousand 40MB RAW stills we shot last weekend are massive amounts of data but in the ballpark of one hour of ProRes422 HD video. A writer can be a pro but even if they’re writing The Iliad II: Homer Goes To Springfield, they’re not dealing with that much data or doing much math on those data. If the Mac Pro is too expensive for you, it doesn’t make you any less brilliant, capable, worthy or less ‘professional’. Saying it’s not the machine for you is not the equivalent of saying “you’re not a good enough driver to own a Ferrari, go buy a Prius.”

This computer is for (aside those lucky enough to be able to afford it who just plain want it, which is fine too) anyone who either couldn’t do their work without it or who, because of this machine can earn more, or achieve more with it. If you’re making a movie in 8k? Well here’s hoping it’s going to play in IMAX theaters because otherwise, it’s just a bit silly to work in 8k at this point. But if you’re making that movie, you need this Mac;  if you’re working with some monstrous, multi-hundred gigabyte dataset and you need to park it all in RAM to analyze it and you’re a Swift programmer, you need this Mac; if you’re operating a studio with clients like Trent Reznor or recording the score for “Star Wars: Jar Jar’s Revenge” for Disney, you need this Mac; if you’re just churning out hour after hour of corporate or educational video with too small a staff budget and too little time, you may need this Mac; and you need this Mac if you’re doing a whole season of a reality show with ten 4k cameras.

So that’s need. But who should buy it if they can, with a hard stretch, safely afford it but can’t say they need it? That may be the hardest question to answer. One way people seem to ask this question, “is this a ten-year Mac?” was raised on ATPFM and thoughtfully responded to (as always) by Jon Siracusa in 329: Mac Pro Day. (Though I don’t think they really predicted this in the prior episode. ;-)) You definitely need to listen to his take on it but here’s mine: there’s no such thing as a ten year Mac but as the Macs in my house, and those at work have reached six and eight years old. I’d have preferred they hadn’t gone that ling and I aim to follow the three-year-lifespan theory when budgeting for my actual work, I can say there’s sometimes, often, such a thing as a five-year Mac. Even if Apple were to announce ARM Macs, it’s unlikely to happen before this time next year. When they are announced, if they are, they’re likely, at first, to be released in the categories where they’d have the most advantage over Intel: specificall,. performance-per-unit-heat and battery life, as in MacBook Adorable-class laptops. To replace Intel in “Pro” Macs, Apple would need to prove the viability of the A series chips under sustained load and support features like PCI and Thunderbolt. They’d also need to have bridging technology to manage the transition from Intel to ARM instruction sets in all cases. 

Catalina supports Macs dating back to 2012 and only now ends the long process of deprecating 32bit software. Generally speaking, macOS gets security updates for two years after it’s been replaced. Apple publishes their policy on vintage and obsolete products as five years. So, this, unless your need for performance evolve past it, is comfortably, a five year Mac. If it gets the kinds of speed bumps we’ve so happily been seeing Apple get back to providing lately, then can you hope to upgrade it to stay current? Maybe. The CPU is socketed but nothing ensures the next generation Xeon chips will have the same package.

Then there’s PCI. if the processors are the ones linked to above, then they’re the reason this Mac is PCI Gen 3 rather than 4 but the next speed bump may also go there and make a new logic board necessary. With Apple’s decision to put i/o on a daughter card, it may well be that USB-4 to the extent it’s meaningfully different in the end from Thunderbolt 3 (doesn’t look it) may be something on an upgrade path.

The thorny question that seems, as always to be provoking a fair amount of whining in the internet, “is it worth it?”

A lot of very smart people didn’t seem to want this Mac. They’re pros. Just not the same kinds of pros this machine was built and therefore priced, to serve. For many of the users I know who feel this Mac overshot their cost and spec marks, what they seem to want is a PowerMac 7600 class of Mac (damn what a deal that machine was!) . The Xeon CPU and ECC RAM perhaps, A slot or three and a replaceable GPU. This is a perfectly reasonable desire and I’d love to see their needs met. I think it’s yet another segment for the ‘PC as Truck’ user segment. I sincerely feel their pain and I sincerely hope Apple decides they’re a market. A price gap between Mac Pro and iMac Pro it could slot into nicely. The investment in this Mac Pro, I think, raises the odds for users like these. That said, what if Apple had built that less over-the-top Mac Pro and not the one we got? That would have been short of the mark for the target market of this machine and of the value a ‘halo’ Mac brings to Apple. If they can only do one, or do one of the two first, this is the one Apple needed to do. That’s not to suggest the pros who want more than a mini and don’t want all the internals glued in behind a built in display aren’t right to want what they want. They absolutely are and those with this need aren’t whining. They are, I hope, making their wishes clear enough to Apple that Apple builds what they need.

What actual “whining” there is comes from a couple of much less reasonable mindsets: “This is a ripoff I can build a Windows PC” or, “A Hackintosh is cheaper!” Maybe you can. Maybe you should but if that’s the case, that doesn’t make this Mac a ripoff. Not by a long shot. The 2013 Mac Pro sitting on my desk has been anything but and as I said above, the dozen or so I support have more than justified their price in the six years they’ve served. The basis for the ‘ripoff’ argument comes not from the ‘can he machine earn more than it costs’ assessment but rather from pulling apart the bill or materials on the Mac Pro and ignoring the value of integration, quiet cooling, a system warranty and, frankly, the aesthetics including how loud it gets under load which do matter for quality of life with the machine. The BOM doesn’t tell the whole story.

One good and thoughtful take in the question is here.  Even Linus of “Linus Tech Tips” YouTube channel has a mostly reasonable take. Linus is technically very well versed, though not necessarily in professional (as opposed to YouTube professional) media production [See above re: the problems with the word “pro”]. He’s just got a ‘thing’ about Apple the way many PC enthusiasts do manifest at its most extreme with words like, “extortionate.”  In addition to a few factual mistakes (minor like top mounted Thunderbolt, not, as he says, front mounted), he comes up with a parts list (missing cooling and not specifying which case, which motherboard and the wireless bits or duel 10G NIC) that adds up to $3,160. He asks “Is a system bristling with Thunderbolt 3 Ports worth nearly a $3,000 markup?” Ignoring aesthetics, quiet, warranty, integration, time saved not sourcing and building the machine and wrangling any incompatibilities you find along the way? If it’s not worth it to you, then you’re not the customer for this machine. The customer for this machine is a professiona needing an integrated and supported solution. They’d buy a Windows workstation and pay about the same price the Mac Pro will cost (RAM and storage CTO markups notwithstanding, Apple legitimately loses in comparisons there.).

Now the unpopular position. If you’re comparing price to a Hackintosh, you’re not in the target market either. This is a product for professionals and professionals don’t stake the reliable performance of their work for clients or employers on license-violating bodge jobs. Sorry, not sorry. But…as a hobbyist is it probably a good thing for the Hackintosh users that there’s a Mac with support for a broader PCI card ecosystem? Hellz to the yeah!

This article will be updated as we learn more, and my inevitable errors are called out. Meaningful editorial change will be noted, typos and awkward wording, just fixed on the sneak.

For more about The 2019 Mac Pro check out @RichzardTaylorTV on Twitter and at fcpx.tv where he’s maintaining an ever growing list of Mac Pro articles, videos and information

[Posted and edited with MarsEdit ]

 

UPDATE 6.12.19: A variety of typos fixed and some small tweaks of language to clarify where folks had asked questions or commented on ambiguity. Then there’s this piece from Dr. Ian Cutress at AnandTech explicitly discussing the CPU choice in Mac Pro. Apparently confirmed my guess broadly. (specific chips from the line still uncertain).

Some background links here:

Apple’s Press Release

Gigaom:
From inside Apple, the Scott Forstall fallout which includes links worth following for more good commentary.

I’m optimistic. Very optimistic. Note the headline of Apple’s Press Release, it’s telling: “Apple Announces Changes to Increase Collaboration Across Hardware, Software & Services”

Over the years, I’ve enjoyed several opportunities to work pretty closely with various people and teams at Apple, in particular the QuickTime team but others I can’t mention and in all those experiences, I’ve found Apple to be staffed by shockingly smart people. Smart in ways that, to my mind, are vastly superior to the obvious brilliance of the Google and Microsoft employees I’ve worked with.

Anyone fairly senior in a tech company, especially in engineering, has to be smart and often a hell of a lot smarter technically than me, but smart is a much deeper thing than the ability to calculus in your head or or keep a mental map of all the personal information Google can collect about you and how it can be used to exploit you, provide you better services. The smart people I’ve enjoyed working with at Apple (and some at Microsoft too actually) play musical instruments, cook gourmet food, race cars, do creative and challenging things deeper, more personal interesting than just code. The smart people I hire when I make my better choices are content-smart, user-smart, life-smart. Apple is overwhelmingly well staffed by this more well rounded kind of smart, the better kind of smart.

What’s always stymied these smart people I’ve worked with, and some have told me outright and others done a great job of ‘not telling me’ by answering questions with the word “So…” followed by a long pregnant pause and careful control of eye contact when the answer in an officially acceptable way is that collaboration is a problem between teams at Apple.  They tell me, particularly since the return of Steve, the policies of secrecy and the inter-group competitiveness engendered by Steve’s style made collaboration difficult. I’m bound by personal NDA’s (as in, ‘don’t talk about this or you breach our personal trust’ NDA’s which are far more binding than the NDA’s of ‘don’t talk about this or I’ll sue you’ NDAs) not to be specific here but if you read between the lines in interviews with and even sometimes in public documentation, one group who relied on another for the ‘plumbing’ didn’t get to see the actual plumbing until late in the game and the product suffered for it or was unable to get the resources to invest in plumbing that an App needed to function.

‘Increase Collaboration’ Sure, sounds like corporate-speak. Apple’s not normal. They don’t tend to do ‘corporate-speak’. Read their contracts. Read their PR. Listen to them in interviews. There’s always the overt and the veiled message. The veiled message is often quite clear if you pay close attention. Here, the surface and underlying messages are congruent completely and that makes the message all the louder and, therefore, likely sincere: “We’re done with infighting and jockeying for position. We’re done with the platforms and system services groups having to compete with the applications groups for resources.  We’re done core services groups having to justify their own bottom lines when they are essential to initiatives that serve the whole bottom line. We’re done with MBA-old-school approaches to retail staffing and management. We’re going to work together to do what we do best starting right-the-#$%^-now.”

Now, I see a plan. I see Tim Cook saying “These guys (and it’s a shame it’s all guys and no women) are large-and-in-charge and they are the adults. They can and will work together and enjoy doing it and our products will be better for it. When our products are better, customers are happier. When customers are happier, we make more money. When we make more money, shareholders are happier and we keep our jobs.” I see Tim being the adult supervision and choosing people with visibly impressive track records for being capable,  mature and collaborative to act as his lieutenants in making Apple better.

I’ve met with Phil Schiller several times and even had to go to him once to pitch him with a problem I saw and while we didn’t agree when we spoke, I’ve seen the feedback I’ve given him (and no, it wasn’t just me, I was one of hundreds of people Apple was working closely with at the same time were saying the same things privately) manifest itself as positive changes every user saw and benefited from. I’ve met Bob Mansfield and he’s a very reflective and deep thinking guy. Those are the two I’ve met and can tell you from my gut are brilliant, effective at their jobs and genuinely interested in doing ‘the right thing’ for customers as the means to make Apple succeed.

I see meaningful thoughtfulness in every word I’ve read and heard from Jony Ive. He passes my bozo-stink test even as he waxes rhapsodic about idealistic views of design. He’s the real deal. I’ve been told by people I trust who work with him that Eddy Cue is surreally capable and a truly decent guy in a meaningful way. (Apple doesn’t need iTunes U as a profit center. Why do they bother?)

It’s clear to anyone who regularly engages with Apple Retail that John Browett was screwing that operation up badly and making employees miserable. Miserable people who’s entire job is representing the company face to face with customers can’t be fully effective no matter how hard they try. I’ve actually been amazed at how good the Geniuses I’ve dealt with as things were getting rough managed to be but there was increasingly visible strain on their faces and in their tone.

My wildly optimistic and likely to be mocked by my ‘in the know friends in the industry’ predictions are as follows:

1- We’ll see long-standing broken things start to get fixed. Think of the evolution of FinalCut X from innovative and interesting but customer-alienating-disaster to iteratively improving new tool. Think of that incremental and positive attention starting to get applied to OS X and OS X Server. Consider that it’s already started. Mountain Lion is the “Oops, we’re sorry” follow-up release to Lion in much the same way Snow Leopard was to Leopard. Here’s hoping the next big cat won’t need an “I’m sorry” release. We’ll see Apple do a better job of keeping the software up to the same standards of ‘build quality’ they have for the hardware.

2- We’ll see changes in how Apple manages secrecy. No, Apple will never do the kinds of roadmap press events and developer briefings Microsoft does but we will see them bringing back some of the kinds of programs they used to have that had selected customers briefed under ironclad NDAs. We’ll see indications that within Apple, teams can actually talk to each other in ways that improve the products.

3- We’ll see Apple do more for the Enterprise. We’ll see another Mac Pro with Thunderbolt because Apple recognizes that low volume ‘pro’ products keep them from being forced out of managed I.T. environments. We’ll see Apple act like they know I.T.-friendly, Pro-Friendly tools and give them much needed toe-holds in the “I use it at home and I use it work” two way street that made Windows the dominant platform and continues to make it the market leader today.

That’s my optimism about the meaning of this management re-organization.

Ok, I lied, I’m not quite as optimistic as I seem. Yes, I do see real hope from this management change, but really this piece is my little foray into the game of two messages in one. The first is to you, dear readers, to inspire you to look for the positive and also demand it from Apple, the second is to Tim Cook begging him to make me right.

P.S. It’s weird to me that nobody in the press I’ve read so far seems to have twigged to the fact that if Bob Mansfield was ‘un-retired’ he must have been somebody very highly regarded. It’s spun negatively that he had announced leaving and is now an even bigger kahuna but I see this is an indication of Tim Cook’s strength as a manager. Be willing to make it worthwhile for a good person who could retire to stay on and do more.