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Bloomberg’s Apple desktops extravaganza: chinless small/big iMacs, G4cube-sized MacPro, full-sized Intel MacPro, and a new Display for the rest of us

saltycaramel

Summary

Bloomberg unveils new details on the upcoming Apple Silicon iMacs, the “small form factor” Apple Silicon MacPro, a refreshed full sized Intel (you heard that right, probably IceLake-SP?) MacPro, plus a desktop accessory that’s been missing from the line-up for the good part of a decade: an Apple-branded Display for less than 6000$! (Stand included!)

 

 

Quotes

Quote

The new models will slim down the thick black borders around the screen and do away with the sizable metal chin area in favor of a design similar to Apple’s Pro Display XDR monitor. These iMacs will have a flat back, moving away from the curved rear of the current iMac. Apple is planning to launch two versions — codenamed J456 and J457 — to replace the existing 21.5-inch and 27-inch models later this year, the people said, asking not to be identified because the products are not yet announced. 

 

The iMac redesign will be one of the biggest visual updates to any Apple product this year, according to people familiar with the company’s roadmap.

 

Apple is also working on a pair of new Mac Pro desktop computers, its priciest Mac machines that don’t come with a screen included, the people said. One version is a direct update to the current Mac Pro and will continue to use the same design as the version launched in 2019. Apple has discussed continuing to use Intel processors for that model rather than moving to its own chips.

The second version, however, will use Apple’s own processors and be less than half the size of the current Mac Pro. The design will feature a mostly aluminum exterior and could invoke nostalgia for the Power Mac G4 Cube, a short-lived smaller version of the Power Mac, an earlier iteration of the Mac Pro.

 

As part of its revived Mac desktop efforts, Apple has started early development of a lower-priced external monitor to sell alongside the Pro Display XDR. 

 

My thoughts

This will be an intense year for Mac hardware. Gone are the days of just shoving the M1 silicon inside the same old MBA or MBP chassis. It’s gonna get wild, and the desktop side of the equation could be just as exciting as the laptop side.

iMacs will finally embrace the “all monitor” look for good. No more chins. Could the lower end 22-23” iMac even be fanless?

The “smol boy” MacPro, I will not understand it until I see it. How can it be “half sized” or “G4 Cube sized” and still allow to install pcie expansion cards? (including Apple’s own Afterburner FPGA card)

The refreshed Intel (maybe Ice Lake SP, up to 36C/72T) full sized cheese grater is kind of a surprise. This extends the support for professionals that need an Intel machine for years into the future. 

The new Apple Thunderbolt Display (or whatever it will be called) will still probably cost 1000-1200$, but it’s a breath of fresh air for people having fond memories of the build quality of the old Cinema Displays, but not under any circumstance able to justify the 6000$ XDR display. Will it be miniLED based? Will it have VRR 120Hz? What about the webcam/FaceID?  

Speaking of desktops, we have no mention of a beefier “dark chassis” M1X MacMini (with 10G networking) so far, but we had ZERO rumors about the silver M1 MacMini as well, looks like the Minis tend to slip thru the supply chain rumor mill. (the fact that they have kept the same exterior appearance for the last 10 years may have something to do with it)

 

Sources

https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2021-01-15/apple-plans-redesigned-imac-new-mac-pro-smaller-mac-pro-cheaper-monitor

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2 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

The “smol boy” MacPro, I will not understand it until I see it.

I expect it will be basically 1/3 the height of the  mac pro but otherwise the same dimensions. The macPro currently have 3 fans in the front this would just cut that down to 1 fan. They will still need it to be the same depth as they will want to continue to push the MPX cards. Basically it will look like a largish eGPU case.
 

3 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

The refreshed Intel (maybe Ice Lake SP, up to 36C/72T) full sized cheese grater is kind of a surprise.

No intel do not have any Xeon-W that fall into the PCIe and power brackets to replace with yet and I do not think apple is pushing intel to make something custom at this point... so the update here will be the RDNA2 and CDNA gpu options, macOS BigSur already has drivers for radeon pro RDNA2 GPUs. Also possible his rumers are off, i expect apple will update the large macPro in 2021 as well to apple silicon.

 

 

3 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

will still probably cost 1000-1200$

For a 6k display (including stand) with good TB4/USB-4 support (aka a new besselese iMac without the internals) the is not at all a bad price. I think FaceID for the external display (unlikely but possible however would require a mac with AppleSilicon). ProMotion (apple variable refresh rate, that requires the display to go down very low not just high) is likely but not sure they can get that bandwidth over a single cable for an external display so possibly only in the integrated displays of the iMac and MBP. 

 

 

3 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

“dark chassis” M1X MacMini (with 10G networking) 

I think you're correct if they keep the same externals for this as the current intel i7 macMini it is unlikely we will see any rummers until it ships. Also I would not be surprised if 10G is standard on the M1X and there could even be a higher 20G or 40G option.










 

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4 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

Summary

Bloomberg unveils new details on the upcoming Apple Silicon iMacs, the “small form factor” Apple Silicon MacPro, a refreshed full sized Intel (you heard that right, probably IceLake-SP?) MacPro, plus a desktop accessory that’s been missing from the line-up for the good part of a decade: an Apple-branded Display for less than 6000$! (Stand included!)

 

 

Quotes

 

My thoughts

This will be an intense year for Mac hardware. Gone are the days of just shoving the M1 silicon inside the same old MBA or MBP chassis. It’s gonna get wild, and the desktop side of the equation could be just as exciting as the laptop side.

In my opinion the Mac Pro continuing to use the Intel CPU's (for now) was pretty obvious. There is no way to scale those arm parts to the performance needed, and given the market for the Mac Pro, they won't need to until 2027.

 

 

4 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

iMacs will finally embrace the “all monitor” look for good. No more chins. Could the lower end 22-23” iMac even be fanless?

Maybe with the vapor chamber tech they could. I'm not exactly sure we will ever get "all monitor" style PC's, because that's basically just an iPad. The scaling problem is not the CPU here, but the fragility of a large screen.

 

Today, when I was in the server room, I moved the monitor/keyboard that is used to check the status of machines, and the power cord caught the door and yanked the (11 year old) dell monitor to the floor. It survived. It's an inch thick, but the entire bezel came off. Now imagine what happens when someone walks away, or their chair pulls their headphones, game controller or something else off the desk (my own desk has had the chair pull the headphones, game controller, external hard drive, smartphone, etc off because the cable gets caught by the arm rest.)

 

So if the mac falls over, if it's too thin, it will just be destroyed entirely. This is already a risk with the existing model. At least with the Intel models, there was an opportunity to salvage or repair it, but SoC ARM model will will have nothing that can be fixed.

 

 

4 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

The “smol boy” MacPro, I will not understand it until I see it. How can it be “half sized” or “G4 Cube sized” and still allow to install pcie expansion cards? (including Apple’s own Afterburner FPGA card)

I imagine they would probably be mounted so the I/O is facing up. Basically rotate the MB 90 degrees and fold it over, put the CPU on the back side of the motherboard. So you end up with enough space for one 2-slot card in the space the CPU would normally occupy if it wasn't rotated.

 

4 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

The refreshed Intel (maybe Ice Lake SP, up to 36C/72T) full sized cheese grater is kind of a surprise. This extends the support for professionals that need an Intel machine for years into the future. 

 

No surprise to me. They were effectively still selling the 2010 model as late as 2018.

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23 hours ago, Kisai said:

There is no way to scale those arm parts to the performance needed, and given the market for the Mac Pro, they won't need to until 2027.

Not at all, creating an ARM cpu that has enough cores and IO bandwidth is not at all an issue. There are multiple are cpus on the market today that have better IO and more cores than intel's offerings.  There is nothing about the instruction set that limits the number of cores or the width of the IO controller. There are many companies out there that will happly license this tec to apple, including people like AMD but also others like IBM, ARM, and many more. Remember ARM servers got PCIe v4 support over 2 years before AMD supported it, and DDR5 support is also going to be on ARM platforms first. The fact that these systems are typically build to solve bespoke tasks means they tend to adopt new tec much faster than the general purpose solutions provided by AMD and Intel.

 

23 hours ago, Kisai said:

The scaling problem is not the CPU here, but the fragility of a large screen.

If its something that you do not need to lift they can make it ridged enough but by adding lots of metal. 

 

 

23 hours ago, Kisai said:

At least with the Intel models, there was an opportunity to salvage or repair it, but SoC ARM model will will have nothing that can be fixed.

I would say the ability to repair is just the same, currently with intel models all reapers are done using parts salvaged from other written off macs. That will not change. You can't buy a new intel mobile  even if your a repair shop your only option is to buy a used one that has be salvaged from other device.


 

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13 minutes ago, hishnash said:

I would say the ability to repair is just the same, currently with intel models all reapers are done using parts salvaged from other written off macs. That will not change. You can't buy a new intel mobile  even if your a repair shop your only option is to buy a used one that has be salvaged from other device.

Well with the current Mac Pro you can do CPU swaps and RAM swaps, into another Mac Pro or to a completely non Mac device which is nice if at some point you come across a now unwanted Mac Pro and you want the CPUs and RAM for a rackmount server, or the reverse and you want to take it out of a rackmount server and put it in to a Mac Pro. These possibilities become closed moving to Apple SoCs, I hope the bigger ones are socketed but I have a feeling Apple will not go that path and will do BGA instead and you have to buy the right CPU from the start otherwise RIP.

 

On 1/16/2021 at 10:42 AM, saltycaramel said:

The refreshed Intel (maybe Ice Lake SP, up to 36C/72T) full sized cheese grater is kind of a surprise. This extends the support for professionals that need an Intel machine for years into the future. 

*cough* I told you so *cough* 😉

 

Even so I'd wait for an official announcement for this, the refresh may well likely just be part option updates and no change to the system board or CPU. My opinion originally was Apple would just keep this one on long term support and replace it much later down the line with an Apple SoC design, but who knows maybe the small model one might just supplant it and the larger one goes away. Would like to see a smaller one first to know how likely that could be.

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6 hours ago, hishnash said:

Not at all, creating an ARM cpu that has enough cores and IO bandwidth is not at all an issue.

I'm not sure if you understood why I said what I said. The Mac Pro's people are hanging on to, are between 7 and 12 years old. So I wouldn't expect a replacement with an ARM CPU part until they are ready to replace the current intel product, eg 2027 or so. By then maybe they will have a ARM CPU for it.

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15 hours ago, leadeater said:

I have a feeling Apple will not go that path and will do BGA instead and you have to buy the right CPU from the start otherwise RIP.

I think that will depend on if they want to pre-make fully soldered skews or they want to have the parts ready and then just socks them together at order time. If they go with soldered they need to have a very good idea in advance what skews users will want but it might be simpler, that said doing a BGA with that many pins (as needed for the PCIe  let alone memory) might just not be possible i have not see such BGA solutions. 

 

8 hours ago, Kisai said:

ARM CPU part until they are ready to replace the current intel product, eg 2027 or so.

Apple might want to sell mac pros to users who are still using the privies gen macPro and by your estimates will be looking to update it in 2 to 3 years. Apple does not just sell a load of macPros in 1 year then not sell any for 7 to 12 years.

 

15 hours ago, leadeater said:

Even so I'd wait for an official announcement for this, the refresh may well likely just be part option updates and no change to the system board or CPU.

That would be a first for intel to issue a XeonW that does not require a chipset change. But maybe with all the pressure from AMD they are starting to offer these types of things?

 

15 hours ago, leadeater said:

but who knows maybe the small model one might just supplant it and the larger one goes away.

It depends on the use-case, for video editors etc yes the small one will be more than powerful enough but for the users that want the macPro due to its massive number of PCIe lanes, mostly audio pro users the small one is not that interesting they want the macPro to have all those PCIe slots and apple is well aware of that now.

 I think for this reason the large macPro form factor will stay, might even get more PCIe slots as apple is not limited by intel with respect to IO and can do what AMD (and other ARM vendors) have done and produce a SoC will much wider PCIe buss to power even more slots, this would increase the base price of the larger mac pro (as the motherboard would get a good chunk more complex) that is why they need to smaller option for users that just don't need to spend all that money on a motherboard that they will at best use 2 PCIe slots.

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2 hours ago, hishnash said:

I think that will depend on if they want to pre-make fully soldered skews or they want to have the parts ready and then just socks them together at order time. If they go with soldered they need to have a very good idea in advance what skews users will want but it might be simpler, that said doing a BGA with that many pins (as needed for the PCIe  let alone memory) might just not be possible i have not see such BGA solutions

BGA actually makes that issue easier not harder, also there isn't really any difference between soldering the LGA socket to the board versus a BGA chip, just slightly easier with a pick and place with a BGA chip than an LGA socket is all.

 

As for existing products Intel Cascade Lake-AP are BGA, FCBGA-5903 (BGA).

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/cores/cascade_lake_ap

 

As for why Apple might actually do BGA, that's just what they do now with many of their other products and I personally think Apple will offer a maximum of 3 CPU options and I wouldn't be surprised if it were just 2. It's not like they need to copy Intel or AMD and have 64 CPU options to fit every use case and configuration possible, pick the big CPU or the small CPU and done.

 

2 hours ago, hishnash said:

That would be a first for intel to issue a XeonW that does not require a chipset change. But maybe with all the pressure from AMD they are starting to offer these types of things?

That's if the even change the CPU at all, what I'm saying there is Apple might not be updating the CPU options at all and other other part options. If Apple has no long terms plans for this larger model other than to discontinue it or drastically change it spending the money on making a new board design and supporting an entirely new Intel CPU product line makes no sense and would only extend the length of support Apple would have to offer without massively pissing off any customers that buy in to the Mac Pro with a new CPU for it to become EOL and out of support in 3-5 years.

 

2 hours ago, hishnash said:

It depends on the use-case, for video editors etc yes the small one will be more than powerful enough but for the users that want the macPro due to its massive number of PCIe lanes, mostly audio pro users the small one is not that interesting they want the macPro to have all those PCIe slots and apple is well aware of that now.

You don't actually need a case the size of the current Mac Pro to have a decent number of PCIe expansion slots.

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3 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

What do they do with the rest of the chips that don't make the cut? Reprocessing is more expensive than binning. ._.

Supporting multiple models is also expensive, more so if you don't actually need more. It depends what the yields actually are and 3 models could actually be more than enough for this. Very few CPU models from either Intel or AMD actually exist because of binning, as in they have so many failing they need these extra models. Other than the very high end which are the most likely to fail the rest are all very much artificial. I mean do you really think Intel actually needs 11 16 core SKUs on a die with 28 cores for binning reasons?

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2 hours ago, leadeater said:

As for why Apple might actually do BGA, that's just what they do now with many of their other products and I personally think Apple will offer a maximum of 3 CPU options and I wouldn't be surprised if it were just 2. It's not like they need to copy Intel or AMD and have 64 CPU options to fit every use case and configuration possible, pick the big CPU or the small CPU and done.

 

They might what to have more due to binning, apple will have the same issues as AMD (they are using the same fab after all) not all cores will always work out. But then again apple already run these cores at a much lower target frequency to AMD/Intel so they are going to have less need to bin based on speed just based on functionality. 

 

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

That's if the even change the CPU at all, what I'm saying there is Apple might not be updating the CPU options at all

I think at best we would get new GPU options until apple update to ARM. But that will depend on AMDs ability to supply and right now its not like AMD have a lot of spare dies lying around, apple does pay a good amount for them but still. 

 

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

You don't actually need a case the size of the current Mac Pro to have a decent number of PCIe expansion slots.

If you want to be able to populate them (assuming your cards are not all ultra thin options) having extra space is a big help. Sure you can get 8 PCIe slots into a smaller case but your unlikely to be able to use all 8 at once. Maybe 6 if your lucky depending on your cards, cables etc. 
 
 

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1 hour ago, hishnash said:

If you want to be able to populate them (assuming your cards are not all ultra thin options) having extra space is a big help. Sure you can get 8 PCIe slots into a smaller case but your unlikely to be able to use all 8 at once. Maybe 6 if your lucky depending on your cards, cables etc. 

Everything other than GPUs is single slot so it's really not that much of a problem unless you want multiple GPUs. The current Mac Pro case is nice, but it doesn't actually need to be that large. The spaces between a lot of the PCIe slots isn't really necessary, it's nice to have but that's about it honestly. I think the size of it has more to do with a statement and style piece than anything. I mean I do really like it but I can see a lot of wasted space so if Apple does go down the route of making another smaller Mac Pro case I'm pretty sure Apple themselves will start to question if they still need the bigger one.

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6 hours ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

I'd say:
They already have the hardware encoders, possibly replacing the Afterburner card. -1 slot
They already have reasonably capable built-in graphics, no need for dedicated graphics for some of the users. -1 slot

Common IO can be built into the motherboard, no need for separate PCI-E board for most users. -1 slot

For video work loading aboltly 4 PCIe slots is more than enough but for Audio pros (users who are even more locked into apples ecosystem than video pros) the PCIe cards these users use can't just be integrated into the motherboard as you would need to build 30 different motherboard options as every audio pro as a different permutation of connectors they need depending on the other equipment they happen to have in the studio. And depending on what type of music they compose. For these users, and some others, there is still a need for a high PCIe slot option.  

I do however agree for the video pro users (the users that youtube's might like to categorise themselves but in reality are not quite the same as studios making films) a smaller device is better as they should not need to pay for un-needed PCIe expansion slots that they will never user. 

 

 

6 hours ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

They probably have the telemetry of how many users installed additional PCI-E cards and what kind of cards they installed to back up any decisions regarding the number of slots.

Apple have more than this they hired a load of professionals throughout the created industries to do work for apple (including making apple PR videos, images but also working on content for appleTV+ etc) these users have direct access to the product and development teams this is how the current macPro was created it is why the current macPro is so different from the trash-can one before, this time they have people in house who can show the workloads they use. 

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14 hours ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

They probably have the telemetry of how many users installed additional PCI-E cards and what kind of cards they installed to back up any decisions regarding the number of slots.

Doubtful. It's likely they know the actual configurations that people bought, but not what went into them unless they ticked "share with apple" boxes at some point, or report crashes.

 

14 hours ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

 


I'd say:
They already have the hardware encoders, possibly replacing the Afterburner card. -1 slot

 

No, no. A newer video codec will always come out, and they tend to come out every 8 years.

14 hours ago, gabrielcarvfer said:


They already have reasonably capable built-in graphics, no need for dedicated graphics for some of the users. -1 slot

Again, this has never worked out for Intel, it will not work for Apple. Plus it complicates the SoC design to try and scale a CPU/GPU part to Quadro RTX 8000 levels.

 

What I would expect is that they "chiplet" the GPU and CPU and make that a ZIF socket configuration, so they can bin out whatever BYO configuration is required. Eg a two-socket system could be:

1 socket = 4-64 CPU cores, 0 GPU cores

2 socket = 8-64 CPU cores, 16 GPU cores

1 socket = 4-16 CPU cores, 16 GPU cores

2 socket  = 8-32 CPU cores, 32 GPU cores

or something like that. Basically you can either have all CPU cores, all gpu cores, or split cpu/gpu cores per socket. 

 

14 hours ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

Common IO can be built into the motherboard, no need for separate PCI-E board for most users. -1 slot

Good luck trying to get all the video and audio engineers on the same board.

 

14 hours ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

They could then put 4 PCI-E cards vertically, 2 on top of each other for each side (one of the sides mounted upside-down), to make sure all ports are pointing backwards.

What I would like to see is both sides of the board being used. Either have the ports facing the top of the chasis (where they're more useful) or have them mounted so that two cards are "in the same slot, but facing the opposite direction", eg back to back so that you waste less of the PCIe card space

 

by back to back I mean 

31382-52579-31432-52559-graphics_radeon_

(shown, apple GPU module with AMD chips) 

Take above but put the ports on both sides, but divide the card, so two identical cards can be put into "the same space" on other sides of the motherboard.

 

 

14 hours ago, gabrielcarvfer said:


A supercharged Mac Mini (or whatever ships on the Mac) board on the top of the machine, a better networking chip, ton of memory slots. At least half the height and 2/3 of the depth of the current one.

 

Honestly, I would much prefer going back to the 1980's configuration of PC's where nothing was on the MB itself, and everything was on cards, so that the system remains useful as long as possible, but that's too much to ask when a lot of these parts are integrated into the SoC now. So maybe just put parts like ethernet and audio on daughter boards that just pass that to the SoC, or can be replaced with a PCIe card with a PCIe card (eg how some sound cards had 5.25" bays for their front panels.)

 

 

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3 hours ago, Kisai said:

What I would expect is that they "chiplet" the GPU and CPU and make that a ZIF socket configuration, so they can bin out whatever BYO configuration is required. Eg a two-socket system could be:

 

Since the GPU needs direct low latency access to the memory controller (like the chipsets on an AMD Zen cpu) the GPU chipsets and cpu chipsets will need to be on the same package.

So you will buy a SoC that will have a mix of GPU and CPU chiplets. ( expect unto 32cores per chiplet).  Like AMDs Epyc/Threadriper line the macPro will go with a lot of chipsets on a single package (with a shared IO die, likely that IO will have HBM stacked on it to provide a L3/L4 shared cache that the GPU and CPU chipsets can use).  I expect the upper limit will be 8 chiplets per package. So that could give you a 128 core GPU + 128 core CPU. The power draw on this would be interesting but the macPro can cool over 250W in the cpu socket so should not be an issue.

If you want to expand your Metal compute power after purchase you get a MPX metal accelerator card (that is basically a load of those same chipsets attached over PCIe with some local cache on the card), it would however be exposed as a separate Metal device to the system. 
 

When thinking about chiplet GPU designs apple seem to have intentionally made this a lot simpler for themselves compared to Nvidia and AMD. This is mainly due to the fact with Metal (on apple GPUs) you can't read/write data (or do any synchronisation) with other GPU cores. Effectively each gpu core in Metal operates in an isolated state from the other cores the only communication you have to the other cores is through the system memory controller.

 

And for display rendering apple require developers to use the Tile based deferred rendering. TBDR means that each gpu core ends up responsible for a small potion of the screen, this is great as it can load the needed (vertex, texture etc) data into the local in gpu core cache  (tile memory) and do math against it. However it does have downsides, if you are doing visual effects that requires data form the adjacent pixels (eg a blur) to do this without getting strange artefacts on the edges of the `Tiles` you need to have multiple render passes were the render output is written to the system memory then write back into a compute shader. But in general this Tile based approach (once you get used to it) significantly reduces memory bandwidth and fundamentally removes the ability to do any cross core communication. 

 

This means apple can create a chiplet based gpu solution without needing any interconnect between the respective GPU chiplets they just need a high speed connection from each chiplet to the system memory controller/cache.

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4 hours ago, Kisai said:

Good luck trying to get all the video and audio engineers on the same board.

When you can get 256 channels (128 in & 128 out) on a single PCIe interface pretty well the only people affected will be those willing to spend $20k-$40k on a new Mac Pro but can't be assed investing in modern equipment and methods, which I will admit is part and parcel with the audio community so 🤷‍♂️

 

Lets also not get too lost here, you can achieve a hell of a lot with a MacBook Pro or a Mac Mini even in relatively high end/large recording studio situations.

 

I'm really not seeing a need for 5 PCIe cards for these people unless they are the aforementioned hold outs of what is now pretty ancient tech they don't want to replace, which they will be forced too at some point anyway when they stop getting supported.

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23 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I'm really not seeing a need for 5 PCIe cards for these people unless they are the aforementioned hold outs of what is now pretty ancient tech they don't want to replace, which they will be forced too at some point anyway when they stop getting supported.

Well part of keeping the old stuff is sound. You might be able to replace it with new stuff but your digital instruments will sound different. Its not just PCIe slots used for IO out to external input/output devices but also PCIe slots are used for digital synthesis (that yes you can have just running on your cpu but the cpu versions sound different). These users are artists and they have given set of tools that create the effects they need (and also they might need to pick up an old project at any time) take a look at this guys channel https://www.youtube.com/c/NeilParfittMusic/videos he did a load of videos about how he is using the macPro and the migration from what he used to have with multiple trashcan macPros networked together.

 

33 minutes ago, leadeater said:

$20k-$40k on a new Mac Pro but can't be assed investing in modern equipment and methods,

The audio equipment these people are attaching to the the macPro is a lot more costly than the macPro itself. Even the software licenses they have for software running on the macPro can cost more than a fully spaced macPro!

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10 minutes ago, hishnash said:

The audio equipment these people are attaching to the the macPro is a lot more costly than the macPro itself. Even the software licenses they have for software running on the macPro can cost more than a fully spaced macPro!

I'm well aware of the cost of them, also there are very many very good cost effective options. You don't actually have to spend as much as many do and a lot over purchase for their actual needs. I actually do have first hand experience with studio recording and also live event production, most of it before the digital switch over but some during that time.

 

And the point was if you can spend that much on a Mac Pro you can spend that much and more updating your equipment. As I said the audio community is rife with hold outs and stubbornness to continue doing it they way they always have because they do not want to or are for what ever reason incapable of learning to achieve it again a different way. While yes that is a direct criticism that doesn't mean I do not understand the problem nor disagree with their desire not to make changes but honestly it is a failing on their part to not want to and not actively try to push themselves forward and professionally develop and grow.

 

And don't think I'm not fully aware of these people today spending tens of thousands buying old historic equipment on reputation alone and trying to use them, I honestly have zero desire for new computers to cater to these people. If you want old then use old.

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6 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I actually do have first hand experience with studio recording and also live event production, most of it before the digital switch over but some during that time.

Recording different to composing when it comes to inputs, composers will keep old instruments around just so that they can keep that `sound` as a tool for their work (just in case they need the `sound).  They could pipe those old instruments in through a intermediate system (and many do, they had to in the days of the trashcan mac after all)..

 

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8 minutes ago, hishnash said:

Recording different to composing when it comes to inputs, composers will keep old instruments around just so that they can keep that `sound` as a tool for their work (just in case they need the `sound).  They could pipe those old instruments in through a intermediate system (and many do, they had to in the days of the trashcan mac after all)..

No it's really not, you do both in a studio.

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