The new Mac Pro

It does look good!

A few months ago I purchased a base-model Mac Pro.

I am generally happy with the machine, but it suffers from a few glaring problems that really detract from the experience of what could otherwise be an untouchable platform. As great as it is, it’s simply not a worthy replacement of the older Mac Pro towers. And that’s a shame.

Long and short: if you render for a living, go and get one of these machines. Otherwise, take a serious look at the top-end iMac, because this is basically an iMac without a monitor.

My first Mac Pro

Back in 2006 I purchased a 1st generation Intel-based Mac Pro. I made the decision because I wanted to move back to the Mac platform after about eight years on Wintel. I game a bit, and wanted to make sure I could on whatever platform I purchased. With Apple’s other offerings, like the iMac, the graphics support was very limited. Worse, in that era, graphics cards (GPUs) were still improving, so locking into a particular chipset seemed like a very bad idea.

So when the first Intel Mac Pro was announced in 2006, I took a serious look at it. After considerable research I convinced myself that the worst possible outcome was that I would end up with an expensive but very good looking PC, assuming Mac OS was a pile and I ended up leaving it booted up into Windows. The simple fact that I could boot into Windows, and that it could take conventional PCI cards (for the most part) wiped out any hesitation, and my yearly bonus wiped out any remaining problem.

Since then the machine was absolutely flawless. It was much quieter than other machines of the era, and seems to be built of rock-solid parts. In seven years of constant daily use the only thing that ever broke, ironically, was the graphics cards. The other thing about graphics cards of that era was that they were horribly cooled and subject to eventual overheating death.

Over that seven years I added some RAM, and put in an SSD. The SSD was like purchasing a new machine. It continued to work perfectly, and still does today. I’d never have considered replacing it, except for one thing…

The time has come

Xcode no longer runs on 32 bit machines. Period. And since you need a recent Xcode to submit to the AppStore, I had to move to a new platform.

I seriously considered buying a 27″ iMac. From an outright performance perspective, there’s little to recommend the Mac Pro over the iMac unless you’re doing serious rendering. And I don’t. But the thing is, I already have a 30″ screen, so buying the iMac means paying for something I don’t need. And a top-end iMac isn’t that much less than the base-model Mac Pro.

Which brings us to the graphics. In spite of everything else being pretty great, the choice of graphics support in the iMac is terrible. However, I was less worried about performance than I was about heat-death. Maybe the chips have gotten much better since my last machine, but given that I went through four GPUs in seven years, it seems like another dead card is a real possibility. With my old Mac Pro, I simply swapped cards with the original barely-accelerated model that came stock, and suffered through a few days of slow redraws while a replacement arrived in FedEx. With the iMac, your machine is toast.

Which brings us to the first problem with the new Mac Pro. Apple, in its effort to make the machine small above any other consideration, uses custom cards to house the GPUs. Those cards appear to be fixed to the internal heat sink in a way that suggests they can’t be removed (at least not by end users like us). And it’s entirely unclear whether the system can correctly identify and deal with a single dead card, which would be an obvious thing to do but, quite frankly, I don’t trust them to do the right thing given the rest of the compromises this box consists of.

So then, you’re wondering how I ended up with this machine after all? Well two things really. One was that the GPUs in the Mac Pro are “workstation class”, which generally means “slower but far more reliable”. Although I have little faith a failed card will leave me with a working machine, I have all sorts of faith that those failures will be far less frequent, both due to the “high end” part, as well as the massive heat sink it’s connected to.

So, in August, almost exactly seven years after I got my first Mac Pro, I booted up my second.

And that’s where the fun began. The new Mac Pro is designed from the outset to use external expansion. That includes such basic parts as your hard drive. This caused me serious pre-sales consternation until a chat with another high-end user suggested that USB3 drives are perfectly good for day-to-day work. So I purchased one of those toaster-like drive holders with the intention of simply moving the HD from the old machine to the new one.

Assistant my ass

Apple builds a minor miracle called Migration Assistant that will automatically move everything from your old machine to the new one. It copies over all your user data, settings, etc, and when it’s done you basically end up with a new machine that’s exactly like your old one. Just faster.

But for some reason, Migration Assistant was never built to understand the case where your System is on one drive, and your Users folder is on another. You know, like the way it absolutely has to be on the new Mac Pro because there’s no space on the internal drive and they expect you to have an external.

So what does Migration Assistant do in that case? It starts by copying over the boot drive, and then it reboots and you have to log in. And one of the things it copied over was the user account settings that say the user is on the other drive…

And one of the things it didn’t copy over was that actual drive, so all the user accounts are pointing into la-la land, and you can’t log in. And at this point, your machine is basically unusable.

Thanks, Apple.

It took me a while to unwind this. It would have been a few minutes had I known this was going to happen and I could prepare.

What you have to do is log into the default admin account on the internal SSD, connect the user drive on USB/Thunderbolt, and then go to the User settings and select the path to the user account. Now you can log in.

But you can’t really do anything, yet. That’s because the permissions on the files are still whatever they were on the old machine, and on the new machine they may be entirely different. The MacOS responds to this problem by basically assigning random ACL permissions to any file it touches as you move about the system. Oddly, those permissions generally don’t grant you write access, which causes all sorts of confusion when things like passwords won’t save, but there’s no error generated so it looks like it’s all working.

It took me quite a while to track down all the instances of this problem. For months, yes months, I would have all sorts of weird behaviour. In the end, the (he claimed) head of tech support at Apple suggested a method that solved the problem in a couple of minutes. So good on them for that, but come on, what’s up with Migration Assistant?

Finally, the machine!

Ok, let me describe what this machine is like to use.

It’s fast. It cold-boots, cold, in 3 to 5 seconds. Waking from sleep is instantaneous, which is amusing because it takes my monitor a bit to wake up so it seems slow.

I put all my development stuff on the SSD, along with all my apps. Most things are basically instant, but some programs, like Mail, are surprising slow and bounce around in the dock longer than they should. Some of this is no doubt due to the external I purchased, which is based on a laptop drive. Oh, did I mention my user drive chose that exact day to go bad on me?

The machine is almost silent. Its far, far quieter than any machine I’ve owned. It is just barely audible, in spite of being on my desktop, less than a yard away from my head.

It’s gorgeous. If you’ve only seen pictures, you don’t know what it actually looks like. It’s the nicest looking thing in my house, and I have some nice things.

It’s small. Don’t underestimate this. I was able to re-arrange my entire office layout because I no longer needed space beside the desk. It’s so small it sits on the desk behind the monitor.

And now the problems

So in spite of the machine basically delivering what it claims to, it cannot be described without talking about its flaws. And some of those are so odd it really makes you wonder what they were thinking.

Let’s start with that hard drive. Given the size of the machine, and the way it’s arranged, they could have included a single drive slot inside with ease. It would, for instance, easily fit on the inside of the heat sink, which is totally open.

Sure, you might have to make the machine a few mm taller or wider, but who cares? There’s no reason the machine has to be this particular size. No one would care if it was 5 mm wider, and yet it would end a lot of the complaints, including mine.

I know what you’re going to say – if you have 20 externals having one of them internal doesn’t help. Sure, but that’s assuming you’re rendering video. If you, like me, are simply looking for a really fast machine for doing development, then you’re going to have one SSD and one spinny disk. Not letting that spinny disk be inside is just plain stupid.

And then there’s the cables. Since this machine has to sprout many cables, it’s nothing short of astonishing how badly Apple arranged the ports. For instance, the Thunderbolt ports, which a whole lot of you will have plugged into some seemingly oversized adapter, is near the top of the box. That means that the monitor cable is pulling the cord out of the case. Why is this not at the bottom, where it could sit on the desk?

And what’s up with the four USB ports. Four? Are you serious? On mine, one goes to the keyboard/mouse, one goes to the monitor (for powering the adapter), one goes to my drive, and I have exactly one port left. No, I don’t want to hang some ugly USB hub off my gorgeous machine.

And since none of those are on the front, every time I do want to use my one remaining USB port I have to spin the machine around. Would it be that hard to put two ports on the front of the machine, at the bottom where they would fit all nice like?

And finally, why does this machine even open? Your expansion capabilities consist of:

1. RAM.

That is all.

And, in the end…

The new Mac Pro can really be summed up thus: it is the top-end iMac, supplied without a monitor. If that sounds like what you need, go for it. If it doesn’t my old tower Mac Pro is available for purchase.