I sometimes wonder what monsters haunt the nightmares of Apple’s resident designer, Mr. Jonathan Ive. He’s so prim, so meticulous, so clean and proper, but on those nights when he has a slice of pepperoni pizza a little too close to bed time, what horrors does he dream up? Some horrible Cenobite iMac dragging itself bloodily across the floor whispering “Make way for the new flesh:” a biomechanical monstrosity of Foxconn components crammed into the pulsating sack of some skinless, cancerous stomach?
Or is it something more like this cardboard box Hackintosh, put together by the guys over at One Block Off the Grid — a cooperative for buying photovoltaic solar panels at a group discount — after one of their Macs proved too slow to run Adobe After Effects?
If you bought your Mac Pro from between August 2006 and January 2008 and if you’ve noticed your video acting wonky, good news: Apple has heard your plaintive cries and posted a support document acknowledging an issue with that computer’s ATI X1900 XT graphics card.
If you’ve been drooling over the 27-inch iMac’s gorgeous 2560 x 1440 display and eager for Apple to make good with an updated Cinema Display at the same dimensions in order to employ it as the window into your Mac Pro’s soul, it looks like your wait might soon to be at an end.
Over on the Mac Pro customization page, additional wording suggests you supplement a newly purchased Pro with the 27-inch Cinema Display… despite the fact that the only current options for purchase are the existing 24- and 30-inch flat panels.
You can look at this in one of two ways: either this is news to be excited about as Apple prepares to officially launch the 27-inch Cinema Display, or as your last chance to order the soon-to-be-discontinued 30-inch, which boasts just a few more vertical pixels than its successor. Best get moving if you’d rather have one of those.
Apple’s fastest Mac is the 12-Core Mac Pro, featuring two 2.93 GHz Xeon processors. Configure it with 25GB of DDR3 ECC SDRAM, and Apple’s fastest Mac will cost you $8,749.00.
Yowza. That’s an extraordinary amount of money. If you don’t mind dropping an extra $300, though, you might be interested in Macintouch’s guide to building not Apple’s fastest Mac, but the world’s fastest Mac yourself.
Yup, according to Macintouch’s tests, their Hackintoshed monstrosity — a total beast of a machine running two 3.33GHz hexacore Westmere processors overclocked to 4.2GHz each and supplemented with 24GB of DDR3 RAM — melted the Mac Pro’s face off.
Of course, there’s a lot of drawbacks to this approach, including compatibility issues and a much louder system than the Mac Pro, as well as a desktop footprint that makes the Pro look compact. But as of right now, it seems that a Hackintosh is the fastest Mac in the world. God help us.
Dealing with overheating engines by running cold air over them is fine for old Volkswagen Beetles with almost the horsepower of an electric toothbrush and weird French cars (I know, the word “weird” there is redundant). As engines have become more powerful though, air-cooling has become less attractive — at least, in the automotive world. Computers still lag behind though. Mostly.
Zack Fanning, who handles (surprise) marketing for computer cooling system expert Asetek, asked the outfit’s engineers to mod his Mac Pro with a liquid cooling system. The results are pretty interesting: He’s able to overclock his 2.8 ghz Mac Pro to 3.18 while reducing noise — due to the fan not having to work as hard — by 13 decibels over a strictly air-cooled Mac Pro running at the same speed. Pretty cool.
Want one? While Zack’s is a one-off, lovingly handcrafted custom job, Corsair’s H50 liquid cooling system (actually made for them by Asetek) can be had for about $80; just make sure to check first about compatibility, because the H50’ll only work with later-model Mac Pros.
The new hexacore Mac Pro’s are coming, the screaming performance and egg frying potential of those new machines are making my previously five thousand dollar 2006 model look positively dated.
To be sure, I’m in the midst of a computational mid-life crisis. Follow me after the jump for the cure…
The Apple Store went down this morning, and when it came back up, Apple had given us all a depressingly good excuse to give them five grand: their new 12-core Mac Pros.
Even the minimum specs for this thing are eyeball melting: two 2.66GHz hecacore Xeon Westmere CPUs, 6GB of memory, an eighteen-speed dual-layer SuperDrive and an ATI Radeon HD 5770 GPU with 1GB of DDR5 memory.
Prices start at $4999.99, but I was able to spec one close to $15,000 with all the bells and whistles before my eyeballs bugged out of my sockets. Shipping is in seven to ten business days, so get ordering
This morning the Apple Store is down and backs up rumours that product updates and introductions could be imminent.
Rumors have circulated recently about updates to the iMac and the Mac Pro, as well as the introduction of a 27-inch Cinema Display and a “Magic Trackpad“.
We’re not sure yet whether new products will appear, but this is a good sign. It’s also typical of Apple to release/update products on a Tuesday.
We’ll keep our eye on the Apple Store and be sure to inform you when it’s back up and if there’s new goodies to check out!
If you woke up this morning ready to pull the trigger on that long-lusted for Mac Pro, here’s some counter-intuitive good news for you: it’s currently “unavailable” for purchase at both the Apple Store and many retail stores around the United States.
This is good news, trust us. Apple pulling an item from inventory usually signifies an imminent hardware refresh, and rumors have been swirling for the last few days about what the next MacPro might have going for it.
What does the scuttlebutt have to say for itself Try a USB 3.0 capable Mac Pro with FireWire 1600 (or even 3200) ports, and — in all likelihood — a couple of Intel Core i7 processors.
We’ll keep readers informed if and when new Mac Pros go on sale. We’re certainly hopeful that any new Mac Pro update will hearken a company-wide adoption of the faster USB and — in Pro-level computers — FireWire processors.
The Mac Pro is about due for another update, and while Steve Jobs has pretty explicitly ruled out Blu-Ray support in any foreseeable Mac refreshes, the sometimes-reliable French rumor site Hard Mac now claims that one of their “better sources” has indicated that we can expect USB 3.0 in the next update.
Although USB 3.0 in itself would be a nice addition to the Mac line-up, allowing data transfer rates of up to 4.8GBps, that’s not all that Cupertino has up its sleeves: they also intend to upgrade Firewire to Firewire 1600 or even 3200, according to HardMac… standards first seen back in 2008, and fully backwards compatible with FireWire 400 and 800.
Finally, HardMac claims that while Apple is interested in Intel’s Light Peak, a standard which they have been heavily rumored to have inspired. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t feel that Light Peak is ready for prime-time yet, and are holding off on this generation before they implement it.
Jonathan Mann once wrote a tune about Paul Krugman that went wildly viral and landed him on the Rachel Maddow Show. Now he’s written one about Steve Jobs and it remains to be seen where this one might take him, but it’s at least a pretty good song by our reckoning: “he’s the best at what he does though I hardly can define/what it is and what he has and that kinda blows my mind.”
Mann is a busy, creative guy who’s led a very interesting and adventurous life so far, which you can hear more about on his YouTube site. He has been writing a song and making a video a day since January 1, 2009 and while he admits he wants to be a star, he also cops to simply “trying to make my way through life.”
In addition to Steve Jobs’ Head (song #541), he recently posted song number #543, Let’s Get Along, which he shot and edited on his new iPhone 4. A dedicated Apple fan, Mann also uses a Mac Pro and a Macbook Pro to record his material.
How come no one ever uses Windows gear to write songs about Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates?
‘Conventional Wisdom’ (and the rumor mill) suggest that Apple will remain on the Xenon platform for it’s Mac Pro line. Yet, while browsing Geekbench results, I came across this result indicating an i7 powered Mac Pro 4,1, published less than a Half Hour Ago on Geekbench (which also if we remember broke the existence of i7 powered Mac Book Pro’s a couple of months back).
It’s not too far fetched that Apple might use i7’s in its entry-level Mac Pro. While previously the single and dual processor versions of Apples top box were effectively the same, with the only difference being the number of processors installed, the current version changed that. The current Mac Pro’s have already segmented the line with the entry level being powered by Intel Xeon X3540 processors (which can not be deployed in a dual processor configuration), and the top model being powered by the Intel Xeon X5570.
This split is important because for the first time it require Mac Pro’s to have different motherboards, EFI, etc depending on the variant of the pro machine. Since they’ve already segmented the line based upon architecture, it’s all the more reasonable that they might use the i7 in the low-end Mac Pro.
The only argument against this is performance. As bench-marked, the alleged i7 pro-box scores lower than the current entry model. Turning lemons into lemon-aid however, perhaps this is the mid-level (ie between the Mini and the Mac Pro) tower many of us have been waiting for forever.
Someone just forwarded me this hilarious story about a woman who was pinned to the floor by her Mac Pro.
The Mac Pro is a big, heavy machine and can weigh upwards of 40 lbs. The story circulated on an Apple consultant mailing list recently. Here it is, typos and all:
This is by far one of the funniest tech calls that I have ever recieved. One of my clients called this morning to say she is trapped under her MacPro tower and she needed me to come asap to help her out. I asked “where are you?” and she said “at home not at the studio”. She screamed “just get here!”. So I rushed over there, punched in the key code to get through the gate and entered her house calling out her name. I found her laying flat on her back on the staircase with the MacPro crushing her chest. I ran up there to pull the tower off her and I couldn’t help but to laugh. You see she is this small 4 foot 6 inches middle aged tiny lady. She just didn’t have the strenght to push the tower off. She had this idea to move the tower upstairs but because the tower was so heavy for her, she thought she could pull the tower while laying flat on her back over her body. Crawling the machine slowly up the stairs. It didn’t work. Helped her move the tower upstairs but the tower ended back down stairs anyway. It was just too funny.
So there you have it. Pro tip: Don’t move heavy machines around by putting them on your body and crawling across the floor.
UPDATE: Seth at 9to5Mac is now backtracking. While he says he’s received multiple tips that Mac Pros will be updated, he thinks the MacBook Pros tip might have been fake. “Shame on us,” he says.
Our friend Seth Weintraub at 9to5Mac thinks MacBooks and Mac Pros will be updated within a week. Seth received a tip that Apple’s pro desktop and portable line are being refreshed in the next few days — maybe as early as tomorrow, but more likely next Tuesday.
A refresh of the Mac Pros is already widely-rumored. The desktops are expected to be refreshed next week with the Intel Core i7-980x, a six-core screamer. But maybe new MacBooks are in line also? The new MacBook Pros will get Intel i5 and i7 processors, just like the current line of higher-end iMacs. The basic 13-inch MacBook Pro will have an Intel i5 processor, while the 15-inch and 17-inch MacBooks will have quad-core i7 processors.
If true, these machines will be screamers.
In February, MacRumors readers claimed to have found a GeekBench benchmark from a Core-i7 M620 MacBook Pro running an unreleased version of Mac OS 10.6.2. Current MacBook Pros score in the 3700-4000 range. However, this result is to be taken with a very large pinch of salt: forum readers say they’ve been planting fakes.
Either way, DO NOT BUY A MacBook Pro or Mac Pro for a while: updates are imminent.
According to Kingsley-Hughes, the next Mac Pro will pack the Intel Core i7-980x CPU… which jives with a rumor we heard late last year, which also hinted a March release.
The Intel Core i7-980X is a 32nm chip, maxing out at 3.33GHz but packing six cores and twelve threads per chip… which could ultimately result in a dual-core Mac Pro boasting twelve physical and twenty four logical cores. Each Core i7-980X CPU also has 128MB of Intel Smart Cache, hyperthreading support, an integrated memory controller and supports DDR1066MHz memor. In other words, Mac Pros built on the Core i7-980x processor will see a huge performance boost over the current model.
Unfortunately, Kingsley-Hughes doesn’t have anything to report on the other high-end, pro-level Mac waiting for an Intel Core iX upgrade: the MacBook Pro. I think we can all take it as read that it’s coming, though: we’ll just have to bide our time patiently in the meanwhile.
“Toy Story 3” director Lee Unkrich gave something for his seat mate to gawk at as he sat at 36,000 feet editing the latest animated tale of plaything adventures.
With not a second to waste — the release date is June 18, 2010 — Unkrich worked on a MacBook Pro, with what looks like shortcut color codes for Avid Media Composer. (Crane as I might, all I ever see are Excel spreadsheets. Need to get upgraded from Economy more often, perhaps.)
Apple products often feature in Pixar movies (perhaps in a nod to history?), the trailer for Toy Story 3 already has a nice bit of iProduct placement.
The mysterious Mac Pro error that caused Apple’s highest-end desktops to start glowing, vibrating and rip fillings from users’ teeth every time an MP3 was played has spurred Apple to release the Mac Pro Audio Update 1.0.
Unfortunately, it’s only available for Mac Pro (Early 2009) computers running Mac OS X 10.6.2. That leaves out a swathe of other Mac Pro owners who are also reportedly suffering problems, but hopefully, Apple will solve their audio-related CPU overheating issues soon, before their Mac Pros turn into miniature fusion reactors.
Anyone having CPU overheating issues on their Mac Pro tried the fix? How’d it work out for you?
(A meaty smack of the palm on the expanse of forehead above the pineal gland, and then the hand trails downward to shield the eyes, as if from a bright light, leaving only the grim rictus of a man self-repulsed still exposed. “Oh, jeez, thanks, Apple!” the blogger says. “Now I look like an idiot!”)
In addition to offering the new processor configuration, Apple has also expanded the hard drive space, now offering up to 8TB of storage in the Mac Pro, spread evenly between four hard drive bays. And while the quad-core 3.33GHz Mac Pro will add another $1,200.00 to the price of your machine, the 8TB of hard drive space is now standard.
While they were at it, Apple’s Xserves also got a bit of a beef-up, with the hard drive options again being expanded to 6TB across three hard drive bays. They’ve also updated their build-to-order RAM options on the Xserve, offering 4GB RAM modules which double the capacity of the quad-core Xserve to 24GB and the octuple-core Xserve to 48GB. Apple also states that the X-Serves will support up to 96GB of RAM under Snow Leopard, so 8GB RAM modules should work in these machines.
Despite the rumor of a dual Intel Core i9 Mac Pro configuration making a lot of sense (my guess is we’ll still see it at some point), Apple needed to patch the Mac Pro quick if they didn’t want the highest-end Core i7 iMacs cannibalizing sales, due to the latter machine’s superior price-to-performance ratio. A slight bump to the CPU frequency is a swift and easy patch to make while Apple looks into a more drastic refresh… although it also resets the countdown timer to the next Mac Pro refresh. My guess is we’ll see the Core i9 Mac Pros sometime early next year.
Last month, we reported the rumor that in the titanium ensconced bunkers of their development labs, Apple was busy testing a new, sextuple core Mac Pro, to be introduced in the first quarter of 2010.
Proven true or not, the rumor certainly wasn’t a bad guess. The release of Apple’s new iMacs, which come in Intel Core i7 configurations, has made the beefiest of Apple’s desktops look like a poor deal for the price, capably beating the benchmarks of Apple’s existing, Xeon-toting Mac Pro for a comparable price. Apple needs to refresh their Mac Pros soon if they want to avoid their iMac line cannibalizing Mac Pro sales.
It’s not so surprising, then, to see this rumor dusted off. According to Polish website PCLab, the next Mac Pro will sport dual Intel Xeon Core i9 CPUs, offering 12 physical and 24 logical cores. Their test results of the CPU show it to run about 50% faster than the Mac Pro’s existing quad-core Xeon processor. The Core i9 features 32nm engraving, so it sips power more daintily than the previous chip, which is also in line with Apple’s increased interest in rubbing the animal blood out of their furs and providing more environmentally-conscious machines.
Of course, it takes a lot more than a Polish website to make a rumor a fact, but it’s hard to imagine what other course Apple would take with the Mac Pro line besides the Intel Core i9. And while it means absolutely nothing, Intel quickly asked PCMag to remove the information from their website. Verification by cover-up or warrantless supposition? You decide!
Even if Leander can’t quite figure out how to use it, the multi-touch capable Magic Mouse is quite a stride forward for Mac owners… especially given Apple’s execrable history of making decent mice. Still, no new piece of gear is without its technological problems. No surprise, then, that the Apple support forums have become the petri dish in which isolated Magic Mouse troubleshooting complaints have been allowed to multiply into a wider culture sample of product failure.
Convert your mild-mannered Mac Pro into a hard drive speed demon. Stuff it with drives fast enough to work with full-quality, uncompressed video. Get more than 300 MB/s on your internal drives! It’s so easy even I can do it!
I’ve been working in video production for the last 20+ years. When you’re working with video you need as much storage space as you can afford. You need a badass computer with big fat hard drives that scream.
You think you might wanna Hot Rod your Mac Pro? This easy, step-by-step guide will show you how.
