The new Mac Pro

[Lawrence]

High end animation studios are expected to have the latest and coolest toys. For those guys, I'd imagine 40k isn't that much. A-list film scorers, math and science universities and 1 percenters who already have their 4 Lamborghinis, etc etc.

But not me

[GR Baumann]

But still, I wonder who's actually going to buy the maxed out machines.

Solitaire gamers with a strong desire to have a T2 installed to rule them all?

[Guy Rowland]

So you can have up to 1.5 TB of RAM, but SSD storage tops at 4 TB? Just...

I’m kinda assuming that it is trivial to add more SSD storage. Still, I guess it’s odd that you can’t spec it with more.

It looks like an ultimate machine for video and graphics, perhaps not terrribly surprising that it isn’t custom-pimped for audio.

[GR Baumann]

In my experience, since the 90s a serious workstation, silicon graphics for example, back in the days always was >10K, somehow this did not change. I paid >12k for my MacPro, never regretted it a single day. My NEC spectraview reference 302 screen did cost more than a well speced out PC. Horses for courses.

[lofi]

The national broadcast studio I sometimes work for have the latest minimacs with external chassis for the hdx-card in all their post-rooms.
Not saying that you can run a million virtual instruments on those, but you surely can run a lot of stuff. I’m the only one (that I know of) who run the dsp plugins.
Most of the other post-persons working there run native plugins (such as izotope/waves etc).
95% is stereo productions, I imagine surround will need more power.
Best,
/Anders

[FriFlo]

I was pleasantly suprised to see a truely expandable system (RAM, PCIe and even the SSDs look like they weren't soldered to the main board) ... But you cannot see past the fact that you pay way more for this machine in its entry configuration compared to the iMac pro with worse components and minus the 5k display. That is once more an Apple Rip-off I wouldn't have expected after them failing for such a long time to offer something decent! The entry iMac pro pricing looked like an apology for that poor company performance ... now this ...! They really think, people must be desperate to use MacOS on a decent machine ...
I think I will try a hackintosh build this year, if Apples upgrade prices are also like what we are used to from them.

[byzantium]

Not too surprised that it's super expensive - given it's Apple, but also I guess they're trying to make their money on the base configuration before users add in 3rd party cards.
The base configuration of the mac pro at €6000 without a display is weaker than the €5000 imac pro which includes that lovely 5K display.
[EDIT - sorry just noticed this is the same point made by FriFlo above]

I was waiting to see how this turned out, but for me, being in the market to upgrade this year from a 2011 i5 imac, and wanting to stay on mac, this means the choice remains either to buy the new 2019 i9 imac and add 128GB RAM myself (cheaper, slightly faster) or buy the imac pro with 64GB (better cooling, better ports but 128GB option crazy expensive).
Worries and unknowns are:
(1) With the i9 imac - fan noise - reports are generally very good, but not exclusively (and may get worse with increasing usage / dust?)
(2) With the imac pro - possibility that 64GB becomes insufficient with large templates, as well as the possibility the imac pro itself gets an upgrade later this year. (But maybe any imac pro upgrade would have an un-needed 6K display which would make it even more expensive).
Very undecided....

[Scoredog]

I love that they show all those tracks but I get plenty of tracks on my trash can, the real deal is when running Kontakt instruments (w/o VE-Pro) as that is the way many of us work here or want to work.

[Guy Rowland]

With the imac pro - possibility that 64GB becomes insufficient with large templates

The solution imo Paul is to embrace a disabled VE Pro template. You'll most likely never get anywhere near 64gb again.

[byzantium]

Ah, many thanks Guy! Hadn't thought of that option.
So (slightly off-topic all sorry), this means I could have a very large (most Kontakt) template, which would ordinarily bring me over 64GB in Logic, but instead by loading the Kontakt instruments in VePro, I can enable and disable the instruments within VePro (?), and the RAM for that instrument (and instrument groups?) would be loaded and fully unloaded accordingly?
Currently it is an enormous amount of work every time I want to create/update a Logic template from a working project, as one has to go into every Kontakt instrument and purge it manually. The memory usage creeps up as one tries more instruments, until more manual purging is required.
I guess the downside of VePro would be the more complicated setup routing that would be required, more complex than the all-in-the-one-(software)box solution.
If I was really sure I wouldn't have any fan noise issues, I think I would go for the new faster and cheaper imac i9.

With the imac pro - possibility that 64GB becomes insufficient with large templates

The solution imo Paul is to embrace a disabled VE Pro template. You'll most likely never get anywhere near 64gb again.

[Guy Rowland]

Yes to everything Paul. At least with VEP 7 the set up can be considerably less arduous than with VEP 6.

I'm quite evangelical about it, I'll admit. The sky's the limit - you can have everything you own in every variation you can be bothered to add, and the resource hit is close to zero. Just pick the bits you fancy as you work.

Pulling it back on topic... the more I've thought about it, the less sense the Mac Pro makes as a VI workstation. Single core performance is likely to be fairly mediocre, you can't spec more than 4TB of internal storage and more and more of us are moving into an age where RAM use has actually decreased rather than becoming ever more demanding. Of course it would be a very slick and capable machine, but... well, you know.

[byzantium]

Muchos gracias Guy. Yes I agree the new Mac Pro doesn't seem to make much sense as a VI & audio workstation - it seems to be primarily geared at the very high-end video / animation / VR studios and the like.

[mickeyl]

Had never expected them to listen _so much_ to their audience. I'm genuinely impressed. This machine is the bomb for all creative professionals for at least one decade. Yes, it's expensive, but IMO worth it. Off-topic here, but as a professional software developer, I can't wait to see how fast this compiles my projects. Would also be interesting to see how Diva and Bazille performs.

[GR Baumann]

...for at least one decade..

This!

Even for private enthusiats like myself, the calculation is pretty obvious. If I configure this MacPro for my wishes, I end up with about 18.000 initially, including the screen in this calculation. May beef up a few years later if required.

So what?

300 per month over a 5 year period, and hey, this will last way longer than 5 years, easily!

[ComposerGuy]

Had never expected them to listen _so much_ to their audience. I'm genuinely impressed. This machine is the bomb for all creative professionals for at least one decade. Yes, it's expensive, but IMO worth it.

I agree!

[Lawrence]

So you’ll be buying one, CG?

[X-bassist]

This is one for the cheesegrater museum. So funny that they went back to square corners and bigger holes. But I think this will go through more redesigns (Apple loves doing that nowadays).

I suppose it doesn’t matter since I’ll be waiting for a much higher single core speed (I have 3.5Ghz now) and a lower price. Perhaps used (which is where my current 6.1 came from). Good news is there should be another drop in price on the old model and a glut of people selling theirs over the next year, at least in Los Angeles. If an animation company or visual fx company have a large team all working on macs, $25k or so each will save them some serious time and can sometimes be partially billed (or rented) to the production, making the price not as big a factor. But I realize this is not a big market for apple.

Then again, my black MP (6core fully loaded) was $3.5k used, so there could be cheaper ones out there in the fall. Now that I have my 128GB ram dream machine, I think I’ll ride this one out for a while.

[kpc]

And let us not forget the Macintosh IIfx with its 4 MB memory, 160 MB HDD. For a pretty $10,969 USD. (About $20k in today’s dollars)

The top end has always been an investment. (It’s actually kind of interesting that the new MP is not far off from the old Mac II prices).

Also, let’s not forget that we pay $1000 for a cell phone now when they used to basically be free.

[Guy Rowland]

Hmmmmyeeaaahhh... but is this really a long term ultra top end bid for our purposes? Low single core clock speed, only 4TB max installed storage... surely if we were speccing an ultimate rig it would look quite different from this?

[kpc]

From what I’ve heard, Intel is having a hard time supplying Apple with chips. I think this is building a foundation so they can make the switch to ARM chips. And I think they have to strike a balance between the Macs used for audio and video/animation and other pro uses like development, AR...

[kpc]

Also - don't you think we might be coming to the point where clock speeds are less of a measurement? Kind of like how we no longer think about Megapixels in cameras?

I'm not smart enough to know, but it seems like working with Apple's Pro-User group (or whatever they call that group of folks on site to make things work better) they are able to look at the system as a whole and optimize each part work better together. So you maybe it doesn't make sense to just look at individual specs like CPU clock speed. Because they can squeak out more performance from the things the CPU uses to help it along - both hardware and software.

There is a nice interview with Doug Brooks, Apple Product Manager over at MacPower Users (MPU) where he mentions things like simply making dialog boxes respond faster can help speed workflows up.

[Guy Rowland]

Jason would be definitely more clued up on this than I, but here's my best understanding. Stuff like streaming has hardware factors and bottlenecks, where Apple may very well be able to help, and also (maybe?) in terms of load balancing among cores. But if a plugin - or chain of plugins - uses only a single core, then within any one DAW that's a pretty immovable thing

So if you hit your limit on a single core, you've run out of road. I think that my jump from 3.4ghz to an overclocked static 4.3ghz dramatically dropped my single core problems, and I did a lot of research to find a CPU that could comfortably reach this level, at the expense of "only" having 8 cores. In practice I'm very happy with this balance as I've only very rarely maxed out multicore performance, even on some very full-on projects. Maybe render times are longer as a result though, not too sure - in theory I'd have thought 16 cores could improve those times. Can't have it all!

From what I've seen, I think for audio use the new Mac Pro would best serve someone who operates gargantuan real time templates (ie use over 128gb of RAM), and is almost entirely working on sample playback without any heavily CPU intensive synths or effects. If that's not the case, I think you'd get a much better PC rig for under half the cost. Likely in another year or two they'd update processors to ARM... who knows how that would work out, but its possible then that they'd be able to get the single core performance nearer where it should be while retaining high numbers of cores.

[EvilDragon]

Would also be interesting to see how Diva and Bazille performs.

Not as good as you'd hope, because they're putting lower freq Xeons in this one. The "4.4 GHz turbo" statement only applies to a SINGLE CORE BOOST, not an all-core boost. i9-9980XE would oust most of the specced Xeons for breakfast, because you could clock it higher across all cores.

This is not a good audio machine, guys. It's putting core count above overall CPU frequency, which is NOT good for audio. Especially not for heavy plugins. Especially not for low latency performance.

Watch:

Also - don't you think we might be coming to the point where clock speeds are less of a measurement? Kind of like how we no longer think about Megapixels in cameras?

Absolutely not. At least not for our workloads, clock speeds are ALWAYS going to be important. See video above.

Likely in another year or two they'd update processors to ARM... who knows how that would work out, but its possible then that they'd be able to get the single core performance nearer where it should be while retaining high numbers of cores.

ARM would of course not be a drop-in replacement to existing presented Mac Pro. They need their own motherboards etc. they're completely incompatible to the Intel platform.

[lofi]

ARM would of course not be a drop-in replacement to existing presented Mac Pro. They need their own motherboards etc. they're completely incompatible to the Intel platform.

They way Mac Pro's been setup in the past I'm more than certain that ARM will be a drop-in replacement.
Unlike other manufacturer Apple focus more on ease than on user config.
That is, you probably will change the whole "tray" that is the motherboard with all its components.
It will not be for free, but then again it will be easy and it will work.

I remember when post facilities had PC, HP xWorkstations (x800-900?), just as expensive as the Mac Pro.
When copying files over the network the whole computer froze and we could not use it until the file had copied.
These were AVID certified computers that were installed and managed by AVID support staff. Geezzzz.
Man was I glad, when I got home to my Apple

I fully understand that there are those who want to fiddle with setups and configurations and such.
But me, I just want a system that works without having to spend hours to get it up and running.
Hello Apple!

Best,

Anders

Edit. Still running that same computer ten years later. Paid $800 second hand for it and have over the years spent another $1200 in upgrades. Amongst other things one of those "trays".

[EvilDragon]

Changing the whole motherboard is not exactly a drop-in replacement because a drop-in replacement means you wouldn't have to reinstall your OS and all programs. Mobo swap would require that to be done, due to the way OS is tied to the UEFI etc. As far as I understand things.