I hope the new Mac Pro Mini is good
Mac Address
·Mac Address
·2022-05-05
·
1,675 words · ~8 min read
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(click sound) (sliding sound) (upbeat music)
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- With Apple transitioning their Mac lineup to run in their own homegrown Silicon,
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what we've seen is a substantial miniaturization of their lineup.
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Just look at the new iMac. It demonstrates just how far they are willing
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to slim things. It's a nice computer,
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but it calls into question the direction the company will take with their professional lineup.
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Rumors have been swirling and they indicate that not even Apple's next hyper powerful Mac Pro
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will be spared from the shrinking. And I think it's worth exploring what that could mean.
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(upbeat music)
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The story of the two compact professional Macs from the company's history is relevant to this discussion
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because they weren't well-received. And since the next Mac Pro will undoubtedly be smaller
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than the present one, it's possible that it could suffer the same pitfalls as those from the past.
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The two machines I'm speaking about are of course, the G4 Cube and the 2013 Mac Pro.
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Remember those? Oh, I do.
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They both had a lot in common, both introduce stunning visual designs,
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unlike anything we expected from a computer before, and I'll never forget the retracting handle of the Cube
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and just being mesmerized at a cylindrical computer.
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- Hint, innovate any more, my ass. (crowd laughing)
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- These compact designs had to re-imagine how a computer can be cooled.
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The G4 Cube was designed to be passively cooled by convection.
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This means the hot air captured by the heat sink would rise up and cold air would rush in from the bottom
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to replace it, a clever design, but the more expensive Cube
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still didn't perform as well as the large and loud Power Mac.
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2013 Trash Can Pro met a similar fate, with its unified triangular heat sink and single fan.
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It proved to not be enough to cool a CPU and two GPU's
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and eventually Apple put the Mac Pro into a service program.
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The other thing that graded professionals was that it offered little in the way of expansion,
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unless you wanted to hang a cable octopus off the back.
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In a round table discussion with reporters in 2018, Apple explained that they recognize these past shortcomings,
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and a year later gave us this, the 2019 Mac Pro.
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(bouncy upbeat music)
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Reverting back to the traditional tower form, it is a thermal beast and allows for a degree of expansion
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and upgradability not seen in Apple since the 90s.
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There are 12 DDR4 slots for up to 1.5 terabytes of RAM
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and the optional to discard drive cage, easy to access Thunderbolt ports on top
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and eight PCIe slots that you can fill to your heart's content.
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One more MVMe storage, slap that in there, need HDX accelerator for Pro Tools? Just slide it in.
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Need a capture card or playback card? Put that in, the sky's the limit.
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(upbeat music fading) Unfortunately, the sky has also been the limit
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for the power consumption of Intel's high-performance processors
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for the last several years. It's almost certain that the new desktop will use a larger,
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more powerful successor to the M1 SoC that launched inside every new Mac
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since the end of last year. Rumors suggest the upcoming Mac Pro's new chip
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will be called M1X and have up to 40 CPU cores.
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And with their current focus on performance per watt and energy efficiency,
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there's little doubt that the ARM Mac Pro will be smaller than the current one.
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So what could that look like?
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Some unofficial renders show that it might channel the nostalgic feeling of the G4 Cube.
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Well, others imagine it as a triple high Mac Mini, which would be kind of boring.
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Or it might even maintain the appearance of this beauty.
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Though, I hope that it has a single centrally placed handle at the top, like a suitcase.
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None of these would be as interesting as if Apple were to give a completely new industrial design
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heralding their new era of homegrown Silicon.
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Regardless, I worry that going with such a small form factor
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could limit the expansion that has earned them so much praise from professional users.
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But maybe it can be shrunk without upsetting the community.
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Let's take a crack at it. (click sound) But before we do, allow me to inform you
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that this video is brought to you by Tunabelly Softwares, TG Pro.
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If you're wondering how we get censored information for thermals on the Mac, well, it's this.
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TG Pro is a robust temperature monitoring, fan control and diagnostics application
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that supports all Macs built after 2008. A lightweight program, it runs unobtrusively
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in the background allowing you to quickly view and log CPU, GPU, logic board, and hard drive temperatures.
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Check out TG Pro at the link in the description below.
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To integrate any computer into the workflow, many pros need at least a couple of PCIe slots
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be it for a capture card, audio interface, or to add more storage.
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So in my opinion, the next Mac Pro still needs to have enough width and length
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to accommodate full-size cards. We'll get more in depth on that in a minute.
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I also hope there remains easy access to the internals.
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Apple's Pro desktops have been always remarkably and ingeniously accessible,
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say for the now discontinued iMac Pro, which was a bit more of a nightmare.
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So it should remain here. What about CPU upgradability though?
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Rumors point to a choice between a 20 core model or 40 core model.
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That sounds impressive today, but what about it in another six years time?
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Back in the days of the early 2009 Mac Pro, it was not only possible to eBay higher end chip later on
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down the road, but users found they could even flash the Firmware,
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enabling support for the next generation of processors
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on their older machines. So, could Apple possibly offer SoC upgrades
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in the years to come? No, probably not.
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On all M1 Max, not only is the SoC soldered
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onto logic board, but the system memory and even the storage
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are permanently installed in the same manner. So it's more likely we'll see more of the same,
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making it a good strategy to purchase the most powerful config you can afford,
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so that your machine can keep pace with the ever evolving demands of your business
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for years to come. The issue of RAM brings up a more interesting question mark,
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the new unified RAM system in the current M1 Max come in two possible configurations, 8 or 16 gigabytes.
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That's obviously not enough for many professional users, so the question is,
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how will Apple offer more? Or even crazier, whether there's space for a hybrid design
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with unified RAM on the SoC and extra slots for DDR4 dims?
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The integrated RAM is faster than anything you can plug in, but it's still nice to have the option to extend
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the lifespan of your machine. (click sound) The other big unknown is whether adding graphics cards
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will be supported, even if there is space to slot one in,
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because right now, Apple Silicon can't even talk to external GPU's
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and all the graphics processing happens on cores integrated in the SoC.
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Apple has supported dual GPU setups before, either switching between them or using them in tandem
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for compatible workloads. But the latter has only been possible
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with two similar cards, like an onboard radio on GPU and a second one in a PCI slot
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or a Thunderbolt enclosure. And even if we assume it's going to have support
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for an add in graphics card, I'll eat my hat if it uses MPX.
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Of course, we also don't know whether we'll even need
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a graphics card. The rumors claim Apple is working on some huge integrated GPU's
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with 64 or even 128 cores, that could be multiple times faster
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than the current AMD cards that are available with the 2019 Mac Pro.
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Still I'd love to have the option to upgrade or supplement in the future,
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whether it's with a Radeon or some kind of Apple design accelerator.
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Could look like something like the Afterburner card, which like, who is it for?
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It just does ProRes decoding. I work at LMG and I can't even take advantage of it
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without really trying. Finally, let's talk about Apple's approach to IO.
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The current M1 line, particularly the iMac,
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has fewer ports and supports fewer external displays
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compared to Apple's Intel powered machines. I hope their new Mac Pro gets at least
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the same ports from the 2017 iMac Pro, four USB-C, four USB-A, one 10 gig Ethernet,
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one SD card reader and support for more than two monitors.
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Apple has demonstrated with this big boy that they do care about integrating
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into professionals workflows more flexibly, but by golly,
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this new ARM Silicon leaves so many questions open about how they plan on scaling the technology
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for those workloads. We still haven't even seen what a larger,
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more powerful MacBook Pro and iMac looks like,
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but those are pretty straightforward to imagine, with the Mac Pro though,
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Apple's history of veering between two very opposite extremes
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makes me very interested to see if the company will be able to balance them.
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(drum music) Thanks for tuning into this Mac Address.
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Now I am aware there is a very fresh rumor that says that this Mac Pro
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is actually gonna get a spec bump, which is interesting. I imagine what we're gonna actually see
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is kind of a transition period with a bit of overlap between your Mac Pro
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and the Intel Mac Pro. But I'm curious what you think, make sure to like, subscribe and comment below.