iFixit surgeons dissect Apple's pricey Mac Pro: Industry standard sockets? Repair diagrams? Who are you and what have you done to Apple? DIY repair site iFixit has announced the results of its teardown of the 2019 Mac Pro – the latest eye-wateringly priced, professional-oriented computer from fruit-branded-biz-turned- kitchenware supplier, Apple. And while the Mac Pro looks like cheese grater and costs a lot of cheddar, you’ll be delighted to discover it’s no …
Until the 2013 Mac Pro (which I currently have on my desk), Mac Pros have traditionally been relatively easy to take apart or put together. Getting parts was sometimes an issue, as while they've tended to use standard sockets recently, they've required custom firmware on the devices, which makes things a little expensive.
Computers from Apple Inc (née Computer) have long been very easy to get into and repair. It is the curse of Steve Jobs who wanted to make it as hard as possible for users to get inside «home» machines.
So, the Apple II series were user-friendly because they were designed by Woz. The compact macs (essentially Jobs' brainchild [1]) were harder to get into and more dangerous once within. But once Steve Jobs was gone in 1985, almost all of the desktop Macs produced by Apple until the Second Coming in 1998 were upgrade-friendly. The plastics in that later era became very brittle (as anyone with a Quadra 840av can testify to). And even after SJ's return, the Power Macs were the epitome of upgradeability while the iMacs & eMacs became laptops in desktop form.
[1] actually Jeff Raskin's brainchild before he was booted off his own project by SJ.
Yeah. extracting the hard drive and safing an eMac for proper disposal was an interesting business. First (and last) time I've ever used my 'big' flat blade screwdriver (which doubled as a prybar) as a discharge rod for the CRT with an appropriate grounding lead clipped to it. Also the first and last time I've ever worked directly on a CRT; One of the few things I'm glad to not have to deal with anymore*.
*Welllll..... except for the RGB Apple IIGS monitor and the monochrome CRTs I have sitting in the archive. I have a goal to deal with both of those this year to either get them out the door, or make them no longer my problem.... :)
Surprisingly few 3rd party vendors for weird Apple proprietary flash. Just one that I know of, OWC has replacements for the trash can, and MBP/MBA flash drives.
They most likely will have replacements for the 2019 MacPro as well (already a category on their website).
I do wish Apple switched over to the "standard" version of the products after they pioneered the stick form factor, but they keep on with their own thing for some vendor lock.
It is basically a raw flash module, an SSD without a controller. Apple uses the controller in their T2 chip (the technology they bought from Anobit some years ago) which also manages the storage in the iPhone.
There's no reason a third party couldn't make such modules, but the market has to be large enough for them to think it is worth it. How many Mac Pros will Apple sell over its lifetime, a million or two? How many of those people would potentially be in the market to replace the built in storage? Probably a single digit percent. That's probably not a big enough market to design/sell these modules and undercut Apple's pricing by enough to make it worth it.
The Mac Pro has PCIe slots and SATA connectors, so nothing stops you from buying the standard model with the 256GB SSD and using that as your boot drive, and using standard PCIe or SATA SSDs for supplemental storage. Or set it to boot from that storage and ignore Apple's SSD entirely.
It is basically a raw flash module, an SSD without a controller. Apple uses the controller in their T2 chip (the technology they bought from Anobit some years ago) which also manages the storage in the iPhone.
That sounds like they want to enable their own end-to-end hardware encryption and security protocols for the boot/OS SSD rather than relying on software encryption over a standard data bus like PCIe or SATA/SAS. It would explain them going with a non-standard "standard" for the device. Interesting.
You can already put in your own storage, you can even boot from it. But the original ones are tied to the T2 chip, so they have to be there...
It’s not really a huge problem... if you need more than a TB or so then it should probably be on a proper NAS anyway...
Over on the other side of the pond one of these fully tricked out will set you back a cool 73k. At least you don't have to pay the Microsoft tax:
https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-massive-b1/configure
I remember a couple of months back, I was watching someone talking about the Silicon Graphics Workstation range (Onyx IIRC). The workstation he was talking about was over £70,000 including Academic discount (likely well over £100k without). He said that the users who pay for those workstations are paying for reliability, machine speed and speed of maintenance. The system, as with the new Mac Pro, was totally modular, with many parts also having redundancies. It was designed to keep the machine running 24/7 under potentially heavy loads, and also ensure that even if an engineer was needed, the relevant parts could be swapped in within 30 seconds, sometimes without powering down the machine.
I don't know how much redundancy there is in the Mac Pro, although bearing in mind the size, I'd say not much, but the kinds of people that use machines that cost as much as this are likely to need it to be extremely reliable, and fast.
I just checked. The basic model is €6000. For that price, I damn well expect reliability and ease of upgrade/repair.
The model with all the bells and whistles is a full 10 TIMES the price (okay, with over 700GB or DDR4 RAM - who the hell needs 700GB of RAM ???). You can buy a brand new BMW Series 3 Hybrid for that price. If I had the money to buy that and I couldn't maintain it myself with ease, someone would be hanging from a tree.
I routinely end a work week with > 3 browsers (Old FF ESR for Firebug, Normal Firefox, Firefox forks, Chrome), 10 windows, 100 tabs open. 12GB RAM in a Windows VM on an older laptop (Sandy Bridge) with 16GB RAM, and usually don't have to close anything unless some crap JavaScript takes it out. I'd say any given tab gets actively reviewed maybe 25% of the time, but most of them get used at least once as bread crumbs to help me recall what I was doing.
I noticed they have a rack-mount version of it; while I wouldn't want to run virtual machines on top of MacOS, the hardware appears to be more than capable of it. (I have zero experience with Parallels, or VirtualBox. what little experience I have with VMware Fusion was for the windows version of it, and it was kind of weaksauce.)
Also, 8K video is Apparently A Thing now as well.
One just has to hope that the end users of this aren't keeping super valuable stuff on the on-board storage when the mainboard fails or the T2 chip blows out and takes the encryption keys for said storage with it....)
Not only is it 'a thing' but these days it's everywhere, even prosumer.
That's not for delivering 8K res selfies, but it's usually for pro production to be able to get 4K (or even just HD) quality vision out of a frame by zooming.
But even pro 16K video cameras are starting to become available in prototypes in Japan. Ikegami and NHK have them and the 2020 Olympics will be full of them.
Trust me, a Terabyte of RAM is nothing if you're editing that footage.
He's not wrong though, in the sense that making cuts, replacing audio, stitching it all together... it's perfectly possible to pre-define these actions using a lower resolution copy of the files, or a low resolution preview, and then process the actual files to produce the final output. you don't need 4k resolution in your preview window - you just need enough to work with.
If on the other hand you're rendering or doing more complex edits, maybe you do need native resolution to be available, to make sure it looks right.
I happened to be poking around the Dell.co.uk site recently and checked out their bargain basement where they sell off custom-built systems that didn't get shipped to customers or returned for some reason. There was a "scratch-and-dent" dual-Xeon (2 x 8-cores) workstation with 1TB of RAM fitted (16 x 64GB), yours for only £11,360 exc. VAT.
proprietary flash is a dirty mac...
flash storage is also know as a coat rack.
And ssd is what you keep underneath the mac....
In all fareness, there is now alot of different ways of connecting storage on a system, nevermind over a network. Some are protocols, some are physical connectors and some both. It can be daunting if you're not deep into the hardware (off the top of my head there's sata, mSata, sas, m.2, u.2, NVMe and Pci-e. Don't even get me started on external connections and I'm not mentioning legacy connections else we'll be here all day).
I'm not being sarcastic, snarky, incendiary, whatever (I know, it's The Register, right?)... I'm genuinely curious. Does this machine contain much Apple-designed content? When they said they were going to "make" them in Austin, I figured that was a code phrase for "rebadged Dell", maybe an R740 in a deskside case. Or an emergency white box clone. The clandestine meeting with Gruber _et al_ suggested a desperation move.
It's a custom designed case containing a custom designed motherboard with mostly standard chipsets and a couple of Apple specific chips. There are a lot of tech companies in Austin, including Texas Instruments who make a bunch of stuff for Apple.
Why do you question whether Apple designed it or not? You think they are able to design their own phone, including a completely custom SoC that includes a custom designed CPU core, GPU, NPU etc. but would be forced to rebadge a Dell for their highest end Mac - a product they've been selling for 35 years? Why would designing the Mac Pro somehow be so much harder than the iPhone and all the custom stuff in it (yes, they buy cameras, modems, displays etc. from others but no one including Samsung designs 100% of the individual parts in their phones, or their PCs)
Of course they design Macs themselves, and always have except possibly during the dark days of the early 90s when they sold stuff like the Performa. Those were so bad they may have been designed by ODMs.
But it isn't standard - notice there are ZERO internal wires/cables? I wish I could do something like that when I build myself a new PC, getting a board with dual m.2 slots will some by getting rid of SATA data/power cables, but you still have wires for the fans, the front panel switches/buttons/ports and so forth, as well as multiple power connections. Designing the board, the various modules and case together allowed Apple to dispense with all that.
I'm sure they'll make money on it. The volumes will be relatively low, but their margins are high when you look at the price they're charging for the base machine, and how much more they charge for upgrades.
On top of that they offer a much needed sop, to their "pro" customers
The expensive Mac Pro just illustrates even more sharply the greed of Apple for not making all its computers, even the least expensive models, the same way, as repairable and upgradeable as possible.
But it no longer matters. It's not as if one is missing out on the ability to use any good software because of having Windows instead of a Mac, since Apple's behavior has sent its market share down to very low levels. They're now only hurting themselves.
"Apple's behavior has sent its market share down to very low levels"
Er, are you sure you've been looking at the right Apple?
Admittedly there's no really solid statistics on OS share, but Apple's share seems to have been slowly increasing for the last 4-5 years (src, src2).
Personally I think they make nice (if very pricey) hardware, but OSX makes me feel like I'm operating a computer in kid-friendly mode. Each to their own I suppose.
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To be perfectly honest, I don't care if my motherboards look like a week-old pavement pizza - they're inside the case so I can't see them anyway. Being white could be handy when trying to fit ${something-thats-too-small-for-my-tired-old-eyes}. But I'd rather pay for proper features than a fancy paint job and unicorn vomit lighting.
It's Apple to blame for the BS of "slimmer and mo' beeyou-tiful" that we have to thank for the spate of non service-able phones and laptops without even a remove-able battery. How does one replace or install RAM or drives (as many laptops enable end users to do) without the ability to de-power the machine?
It's done by having the connectors disconnect the power, excluding ground, first, by having shorter 'fingers' on the connector for those lines. The rest is up to the motherboard having isolation between that connector and the others, so that the drop of all the data lines to basically zero won't affect the other circuitry.
You'd want that with a Mac. I do a lot of data recovery work. I make a lot of money from Mac folks that their Mac didnt want to recognise their hard drive cos the wind blew in the wrong direction.
I wouldn't use a Mac for critical data work. Wayyy too fussy with data connections and standards.
An awful lot of cars cost more than houses all over the country.
The overwhelming benefit of ANY house in ANY part of Yorkshire is that its not ANYWHERE near the obnoxious git who picked on God's Own County, who is obviously a lancastrian.
A car depreciates like a stone, some faster than others, your 40 grand Mac won't.
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