Hacker News Reader

Comment by hdevalence | Hacker News Reader

The design of the Mac Pro is certainly attractive, but since the only way to add on to it is through Thunderbolt, it seems a bit counterproductive. The sleek black tube isn't so sleek when you need to have a bunch of external drives sitting on your desk.

View on HN

Right - and for anyone with a new Mac, or Macbook Pro, for that matter? Your Cinema Display will still be only USB2, with an annoying MagSafe adapter required, and “only” Thunderbolt 1.

No announcement of a refresh for the display.

"Thanks for buying a $3,000+ professional level machine from us. The display? Well, you'll have to buy an outdated $1,000 unit from 2009."

I'm really surprised they didn't announce a 4K Cinema Display, honestly. I guess the price is still too high.

I'm still holding out some small glimmer of hope that it might come (at a high price) when the Pro is actually launched. They keep making mention of 4K...

Not only that, the ecosystem for Thunderbolt is far from flourishing. I searched a couple of months ago, when the original announcement was made, and the external enclosures are very expensive, in the range of $1500. That's without adding the cost of a bunch of disks.

I've decided that Windows 7 is my last Windows version. Once my current machine hits EOL, I really want a Mac Pro, but I need a way to get lots of storage that is reliable, reasonably priced and relatively quiet.

OWC looks like they have some decent Thunderbolt drive options now: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/

Barring that, if you're looking to add lots of storage, there are a lot of FW800 ($30 adapter) options. Also there are some ridiculously cheap USB 3.0 options but they look like they have lots of problems (build quality, firmware).

After seeing videos of traveling professional photographers bringing a thunderbolt display and more in checked luggage, I think this form factor will be very appreciated by that market segment.

Why would anyone care what a work horse of a computer looks like? Except if your Apple and you want to show that looks on a workstation is initiative????

I care. Aesthetics is important to me, and when presented with two comparable solutions, one ugly option and a pretty option, I'll most likely go for the pretty solution.

so you actually see your workstation computer? I always had mine in another room to block out noise.

Own goal! :-)

Thunderbolt cables are long enough that you could hide the drives elsewhere, if appearance is the main concern. This would still take up a lot less room on a desk even with a bunch of drives.

I'm looking for a clever designer to kickstart a MacPro case - that beautifully fits in your lovely black computer on the desktop along with slots for drives and cables. Could be quite a new thing for the independent accessory makers.

That doesn't solve the noise problem though. Internal drives are significantly quieter than external enclosures.

How loud are external SSDs compared to HDDs? Do they need a lot of cooling?

SSDs are effectively silent; they have no moving parts.

also, they don't require active cooling (because no moving parts; no friction, low power consumption)

SSDs still aren't at the capacities of HDDs, which are needed when handling lots of photos or videos in a cost-effective manner.

I'm seeing 98 feet. You could have them in a locked closet or cabinet conceivably. Expensive though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_%28interface%29

Note: I haven't read the entire wiki or triangulated it so this is a quick take.

http://gizmodo.com/5974052/these-optical-usb-and-thunderbolt...

That's 9.8 feet, not 98.

The first such optical Thunderbolt cable was introduced by Sumitomo Electric Industries in January 2013.[30] It is available in lengths of 10 metres (33 ft), 20 metres (66 ft), and 30 metres (98 ft). However, these cable only retail almost exclusively in Japan, and the price is 20–30× higher than copper Thunderbolt cables.

Copper cable is limited to 9.8 feet (aka 3 meters in the rest of the world), but optical cables can be up to 330 feet/100 meters.

That price looks nasty, though.

Recall that internal expandability was a feature of the Intel Mac Pro only. The same enclosure was used for the PowerMac G5, and most of the space inside was for the cooling systems. There was room for a single extra hard drive and a couple cards and that was it.

We're just going back to that, in an era when it matters less.

Not only that, I surely am not expecting high end graphic cards to be appearing in boxes with Thunderbolt connectors.

There the design is also quite limited.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com