Apple

Too dynamic. Stationary boilers.

The only time those are fun is in an earthquake ....

Interesting concept. I actually like the external expansion idea; but I think for it to work a lot of price points need to be right: thunderbolt expansion subsystems, and the "processing" cylinders (aka the mac pro proper). Which I think it's not going to happen, but who knows.

In any case, if any of you can find another product which can pack as much generally programmable computational density in the same volume, I'd be very interested in reading about it.

Yeah, it's a nice small case, but by the time you plug in expansion units for I/O, external drives, etc. you loose a lot of the small factor and you have cable spaghetti across your desk and power strip minefields underneath. For a rackmount machine you often have to plug together different units, but at least it goes in a case to keep it all neat.

The real-world volume is not that small tho. Round things don't pack together like square things so all the space between this inscribed circle and the square it would take up is ... lost. Add in the cables and accessories and it's not as small as it would have you think.

The idea is still kind of nifty but it reminds me of the water-cooled doors : an interesting idea with some value but not the earth-shattering breakthrough our Marketing Overlords would have us believe.

And if you know anything at all about heat transfer and their photo is accurate, well ... do the words booool sheet ring any bells ?




Ho-leee stinky stuff, Batman .... did they issue barf bags to the attendees at the door ? Grown adults listened to that worthless swill and applauded ? Is Timmy trying to outdo Monkeyboy ? " I looove this COMPANY !!"

These are adult human beings with an education and they were cheering that self-serving unutterably disgusting crap ? Gag me with a spoon.

Next time they can save some money and hold their conference in the primate enclosure at the zoo. The US is toast

indeed, that's what drew me to the old mac pro. I can throw everything in one box and hide it under the desk.

it's speculation about an unreleased product, isn't that what everybody wants to hear nowadays???

The beauty is, the obedient Apple-buying creatures will reach for their wallets once more. ( Marketing'u akbar! ?) I still see them thanking their lord and savior Jobs, even in an unsolicited advertisement recently. This comes straight from the spam:

It all depends on the price points that these units and the associated thunderbolt stuff reach.

The cable mess is not a big deal, most of those devices can be daisy chained, and there will be an industry of accessories for cable management to keep the Apple design junkies satisfied. Now, if the "cylinder" is priced competitively, the prospect of being able to upgrade the computing of a machine used for video stuff, for example, by simply swapping said cylinders while keeping the rest of the stuff already invested and which moves at a slower pace of development (data arrays, mid bandwidth specialized PCI-E cards, etc) intact could be attractive for the sort of audience Apple may be targeting: professionals or organizations who don't really want to know much about computers, but who need to do stuff with them that requires certain degree of compute power.

The degrees of integration has turned the computing devices into commodities. And apple thus far has made bank by seeing that trend. I personally don't quite care for this device/design personally, as far as shapes of objects go I prefer boxes over cylinders.

Yikes, only 4 memory slots? Say hello to super expensive ram!

The "Painting the Future" WWDC demo with Mari and Pixar on the new Mac Pro was interesting.

Off hand, it looks to be rather sad for a top end computer. It does a lot better as a cool looking and somewhat powerful computer with neat-O cooling. Personally, I think top end/pro desktops should offer a minimum of 4 processor chips, each with as many cores as the manufacture offers. 8 would be better. And RAM slots to go with it. Basically, the large pro desktop market targets people what want (and very occasionally actually need) oodles of computing power on their desk. If you don't want/need that you save your money and buy something like the mac mini, imac, or a laptop.

I am also unsure if the thunderbolt will really sell for expansion. I tend to think of pro computers as having room for a few hard drives at a minimum, preferably a small RAID. I can see how it could be a better solution - but I am unsure if it will sell. Also, a lot will depend on getting cost effective expansion units.

Of course, very few computer users actually need that sort of power. and expansion. The computer on my desk at work is a 4 year old desktop, and it runs fine. It is quite possible I will tell them to put off replacing it simply because there is no need to waste the money. Likewise, for personal use I want a laptop. I just don't need a zillion processors to check my email.

In the long run, I think desktop computers will again become like the old workstations: almost nobody needs the power. Almost nobody wants to spend the money. So they are rare and expensive. Or maybe they will be consumed by the cloud and vanish altogether. Apple will probably exit the market altogether since they are more interested in consumer stuff.

Now that I actually had some time to check this stuff out, it looks like OSX mavericks will be worth upgrading if for no other reason than improved multi-monitor support (and using the appleTV as a monitor as well).

But do I want to run chameleon on my mac pro just to get it to work?

Oh and the new machine is pretty nice but I don't have a problem with the old one (other than the infamous 32bit efi problem...which isn't much of a problem at all) so I'll pass at first

Found an AIW X800, quick googling says this thing (at least the video-in that makes it worthwhile) won't work without a windows PC. Is that true? I don't have a windows machine with PCIe slots, unless I could have it recognized directly in a windows VM, which seems kind of hokey.

I might have some luck with the FM tuner, at least. I will hopefully have some time to play with it this weekend