Mac Pro Mockups, State of the CPU, and John’s Cable Research, with John Kheit – ACM 508
Some Mac Pro fan mockups have been circulating, and Bryan Chaffin is joined by John Kheit to discuss their pros and cons. And surprise, John Kheit is full of mostly cons, so they also discuss what they think the Mac Pro needs to be awesome. They also discuss the state of the chip industry, Intel’s 56-core Cascade Lake, and Apple’s ARM ambitions for the Mac. They wrap up the show with a look at John’s obsessive research to find the best USB-C cable.
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Show Notes
Sources referenced in this episode:
- A Cool Concept Video: Modular Mac Pro
- Intel Announces Cascade Lake: Up to 56 Cores and Optane Persistent Memory DIMMs - Tom's Hardware
- John's Jesus Cable (USB-C Cable from Apple): $39 - Apple Store
- John's Jesus Cable (USB-C Cable from Apple): $39 - Amazon
- Apple Context Machine Facebook Group - Facebook
- Bryan's Twitter
- Bryan's blog: GeekTells
Another great show! Best topics ever, including the what the f is Apple doing for Education? Everything announced at the education event last year sounded half-arsed and if held to a WWDC type of event for education, proper solutions might be forthcoming.
I totally agree with John, modular had better mean you can upgrade modules inside the Mac Pro.
If modular means EGPUs, Apple’s current pro platform solution, I give up and I’m with John, lost the plot, where do we go next? EGPU should be a temporary/mobile (MacBook Pro) solution. I guess Mac Mini falls into that category too, at the moment. It’s too wobbly at the moment to be a Pro solution.
As for server grade ARM CPUs, which I would dearly like to see in Mac, there are a few in the wild.
Amazon announced their own ARM chip based cloud services last year.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amazon-cloud-aws-arm-graviton-instances,38162.html
ARM announced Neoverse purely sever grade CPUs this year
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13959/arm-announces-neoverse-n1-platform/2
ARM previously had pro/consumer Cortex server chips.
I don’t know if any of these are suitable for Mac Pro (not my bailiwick), but you can bet if Amazon is designing ARM servers, Apple will have its own ideas about ARM server chip designs and what it would use in Mac & Mac Pro.
I’m waiting for the new iMacs to hit the Refurb store, but won’t be springing for the i9. If you think upgrade prices are outrageous in the US, you want to see what they look like in Australian dollars.
Mac is definitely outside the tent these days. Bare minimum upgrades to macOS for iOS compatibility. Nothing new since touch in 2007. No pencil support. Mac is WAY outside the Apple tent now. A legacy system for coding iOS and Marzipan might not be the death of quality Mac apps, but will undoubtedly swamp macOS with dogzbreakfast iOS ported apps. The best that could happen is Mac owners refuse to download them, even if they’re included in the iOS purchase price. Like we had to do with Watch apps.
You didn’t discuss the end of iTunes, which would annoy me. It’s not the most elegant Mac app, but it used to be a great library of books, apps, movies, television shows, music, ringtones, etc. I still use iTunes for hours every day, streaming library content to televisions and iPads. I still have an EyeTV free to air recorder and slurp all of my television viewing from the aerial into iTunes for consumption at my leisure. I tried Plex long ago and it destroyed my library for what could politely called a sub-standard user experience.
More Kheit!