This seems to be a common misunderstanding about the new Mac Pro. Apple has actually improved modularity by liberating expansion from a fixed physical space. Additionally, users aren't required to install scary-looking computer hardware into PCI slots. They can just use the familiar UX pattern of plugging a cable into a port.

Except the Thunderbolt device is twice the price of the equivalent PCIe card and now you have cables everywhere.

You already had cables everywhere if you were a professional. I don't know any professional photographer, video editor or audio professional that doesn't use tons of external storage.

It's mainly non pros that argue that a few internal 2TB bays would be enough, which is laughable for pro use.

But if they were professionals didn't they use SAN (or at least NAS) for this ?

Don't get USB hard disks old pretty quick ? (and the performance with GByte LAN is much bigger). So it's just a single LAN cable ?

I suppose it depends whether you consider Pro and Enterprise to be synonymous. I don't think they are.

Anyway, what kind of high end Mac user ever bothered with USB drives, when you could use Firewire and have double the throughput with no CPU overhead?

Seems like you missed the part where Apple did it, therefore it finally became good. Just like Intel was a dirty word until Apple switched, then it was good.

Seems like you have an axe to grind? Because I, for one, liked Intel before AND after Apple switched to it just fine.

Who are these mythical people that only liked Intel (or external peripherals) after Apple adopted them? Are they from straw-man land?

Definitely not from straw man land. I remember many people, both that I knew personally and people on the internet that would extol the virtues of the G4 and G5 processors. Especially as Intel started to widen the gap in terms of clock speed, they would explain how clock speed doesn't matter and that the Apple processors do so much more work per clock cycle. Then after the switch to Intel the same people would talk about how great the Intel processors are and refer to how fast the processors could be clocked. Its no longer relevant to anything, but they were a very real group of people.

Coming in 10 hours late, but from the little I know of computer architecture...

Intel won that fight on being at least a generation ahead in semiconductor technology. Intel have efficiency problems compared to the ARM processors now, because they can't just throw many more transistors at their design when the metric is amount of processing/watt.

I am looking at the name of this website and I see that the name of this website is "hacker news".

Could you please explain your comment a little more? I'm honestly curious to know why you think the concept of abstracting technology into easy to use components is in conflict with the "hacker news" ethos.

I was responding particularly to:

"Additionally, users aren't required to install scary-looking computer hardware into PCI slots."

the hacker news crowd is not the "user" in this quote though.

Precisely! This is especially true with the chaining capabilities of Thunderbolt.

People don't change Mac Pros like they change iPhones, the one you buy today will still be powerful in a couple of years.

From the looks of it, it feels like that couple of years could be 5-7 years.

I recently bought a new Macbook Air. My old Macbook Pro was 4 years old. Not that the old machine stopped working - it still works perfectly fine. The Core 2 Duo CPU was up to all tasks I threw at it (compiling C++ code). I just wanted longer battery life.

That's why I see no problem with the new Mac Pro being so "unmodular". Unless something revolutionary happens with CPUs that machine will be good enough for more than 5 years.

What tasks do you do? I have a 2010 MBPro running ML and it slow has hell for doing any kind of iOS dev work. It used to be pretty fast but Apple's software updates - OS + Xcode have slowed it down considerably.

How much RAM do you have? OS X is quite memory hungry and is terrible when it has to page. I'd recommend maxing out the RAM if you haven't already. I'm guessing you have a regular hard drive too. An SSD will make it feel like a new machine.

Also, Mavericks is much snappier than ML from what I've seen so far and makes much better use of RAM.

I have 4GB and yeah, my hdd is non-SSD. But it wasn't this bad back when I was working with snow leopard. Unfortunately Apple forces you to get their new OS to use the new Xcode and that has screwed my performance.

I've disabled a bunch of things, Spotlight indexing, dashboard, their notification stuff, etc and also moved swap to a new partition, its helped, but still not as snappy as when it was new.

At the moment, I'm weighing my choices .. do I upgrade RAM,SSD or do I get a new one - but then I have to buy apple's expensive ram and cant easily change the SSD in the future.

If you max the RAM to 8GB and add a SSD it will be a completely new machine. Also not that hard to do, well worth it. I have the 2011 model and updated first from 4 to 8 and then 16GB of RAM and from a standard HDD to Crucial M4 500GB and the machine is a beast, must faster in 10.9 than when I originally bought it.

Apple added memory compression in Mavericks, so upgrading to the latest OS may improve your situation. Disclaimer: I don't actually know.

I upgraded my late-2008 iMac with Mavericks to see if it performed better than Mountain Lion given that my machine's maxed out at 4GB of RAM and my experience thus far has been that overall, the system is more responsive, but there's a lot more latency in doing things like restoring backgrounded applications that haven't been quit, but are still running. It may be that my machine is too old, but Mavericks has just shifted the latency around in this case.

Just maxing it to 8GB will make a vast difference. You don't have to buy RAM from Apple. http://www.crucial.com/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=5A1D576...

I had a 2009 MBP. Lion was slow as hell but swapping the HDD for a SSD did wonders. The RAM upgrade I tried before that didn't help as much as the SSD.

Tasks: OS X developer.

And to follow up, the E5 is an absolute beast of a processor. It's hard to imagine Intel having that kind of leap in the next 5-7 years (but here's hoping ;).

That's just the modern PC landscape for you. My Mac Pro is on the high end of that age range and it still does what it needs to do.

Pretty much - even the base version of the Mac Pro will take more than half a decade to become obsolete (at the rate we're seeing now). And I believe the Mac Pro's processor is still on a socket (correct me if I'm wrong), so it's also upgradeable.

Even if it's a socket, Intel's been churning out new sockets every 2 years or so. On desktops it's gone LGA 1156 (2009), LGA 1155 (2011), LGA 1150 (2013). For servers it's LGA 771 (2006), LGA 1366 (2008), and LGA 1567 (2010). You have a pretty limited upgrade window. One tick/tock, and then your socket is outdated.

The new Mac Pro, provided it's socketed, would be on LGA 2011.

Yes, the socket thrashing by Intel is a bigger problem.

You'll probably have an interesting time updating an LGA2011 in 2015, never mind the RAM.

That's beneficial for those who will want to upgrade - once the new sockets are out, the prices for the previous generation chips will go down - you can potentially upgrade from the base quad core to a six core processor, giving it a good boost in performance.

That has almost always been a problem. Even in the past when you could keep socket for 5 years, the chipset on the motherboard was limiting you upgradability to processor of the same generation.

Interestingly you don't touch one of the arguments, physical connections limit the connections (as in bandwidth and future updatability) but the same is true for the internal of cpus and their connections with the RAM and when evolution it's not enough disruption comes to the play, optical connections.

Regarding the screen size and the usability factor, same could have been said about the pc (the keyboard has certain size for some reason) but the goal is not to carry a pc but to extends our capabilities through it and eyes sir are a weak link in a bright future of tech I'm not sure I'll see or may never happen (<dream>and this is totally offtopic and it's even daydreaming but... sci-fi like the extremis armor were mechanisms and tech are fused to the actual human may be the path... with the appropriate tech, you never know when one of those "damn nature you screwed this time with this human" times, curiously the errors make him an uber genius; will create it</dreaming>).

remember we are machines of ideas and our body the bare metal on which our vm runs.

Yea the only things you can't change are the CPU, the GPU or the RAM. You know the things that I might want to upgrade the most over time.

Except the RAM is upgradeable: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-57588607-263/how-upgrad...

...and the GPU may be upgradeable: http://www.macrumors.com/2013/10/25/graphics-cards-in-new-ma...

And even if you can't upgrade the internal GPU, you have 2 thunderbolt ports. Just plug in a new card.

Intel hasn't approved an external graphics card that can connect via thunderbolt, and probably won't for the foreseeable future. It's one of the big issues I have with thunderbolt -- it's micromanaged to hell and back.

Are you saying there is no all-in-one external graphics card?

Sonnet makes an external PCIe Thunderbolt enclosure that you can pop a graphics card into, and there is that DIY guy: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/162652-diy-external-thund...

Granted that is not pretty and there are OS support issues. But it is possible and I am hopeful it gets easier.

The last time the sonnet enclosure came up it was determined that the bandwidth of thunderbolt is simply not yet enough for a high end graphics card (especially if we're talking about upgrading years from now) and the enclosure itself did not provide enough power (only 100-150w). Not to mention there are no reports of this actually working with any graphics card, let alone a high end one worth upgrading to.

Just to demonstrate the bandwidth of PCIe3 x16: PCIe1.1 x16, PCIe2 x8 and PCIe3 x4 all provide around 4GBps. That's right, not 4 Gbps. So that's 32Gbps times 4 for a grand total of 128Gbps over PCIe3 x16. In comparison, Thunderbolt 2 at 20Gbps is very constricted.

I'm not sure the external GPU route will ever be useful for professionals, but I'm hopeful that it will become a more viable option for gamers who want a laptop that is light and thin, and the decently portable option to plug in a midrange graphics card that would work way harder than any integrated graphics could.

ok RAM I'm wrong about but the GPU extension is not the same thing as being able to buy the Video Card you want. So if you want to upgrade to the latest version of CUDA you can't.

The Mac Pro is from Apple, so it is fair game as an example of something 'passé', bad or a dead end.