🧀🖥️

December 15, 2019 6:46 AM

Can the New Mac Pro Actually Shred Cheese? [iFixit][YouTube] The repair website iFixit decided on Friday to actually test whether new Mac Pro could act as cheese grater. Unfortunately, the product's aluminum casing doesn't perform as well as users might have hoped.
posted by Fizz (46 comments total)

Hey, who ordered the Mac & cheese?
posted by zamboni at 7:23 AM on December 15, 2019 [57 favorites]

Unfortunately, the product's aluminum casing doesn't perform as well as users might have hoped.

So you’re saying my grate expectations were unfounded?
posted by zamboni at 7:27 AM on December 15, 2019 [15 favorites]

I mean, it definitely shreds cheese. It’s just a horrible cheese grater, given you generally want to use the shredded cheese somewhere and not leave it in the grater for the rest of its life.
posted by brook horse at 7:37 AM on December 15, 2019 [7 favorites]

That's disappointing. I was really hoping we could get people to stop buying pre-packaged cheese and Make America Grate Again™
posted by Thorzdad at 7:43 AM on December 15, 2019 [8 favorites]

America is quite grating already, tbh.
posted by Omon Ra at 7:45 AM on December 15, 2019 [13 favorites]

This is what happens when you try to use 3rd party products, if they used Apple Approved cheese it would have been fine.
[n.b. APPLE APPROVED CHEESE MAY NOT BE AVAILABLE IN YOUR REGION, OR ANY OTHER REGION. ]
posted by Lanark at 7:49 AM on December 15, 2019 [11 favorites]

iGrater
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:59 AM on December 15, 2019 [3 favorites]

They got rid of the Monterey jack so you have to buy an adaptor
posted by oulipian at 8:03 AM on December 15, 2019 [82 favorites]

On Macintouch, I learned a few days ago that a fully loaded new Mac Pro costs more than a Corvette Coupe, $60,000+. So in my post-midlife crisis phase I guess I’ll buy the car. And at least this news confirms my decision as I originally was hoping to prove my masculinity was still thriving with wicked fast render times and amazing homemade pizza with freshly grated cheese. Thank you Metafilter for showing me the way!
posted by njohnson23 at 8:41 AM on December 15, 2019 [2 favorites]

all these puns are a little cheesy
posted by dis_integration at 8:45 AM on December 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

Just blow the cheese out with compressed air.
posted by grouse at 8:46 AM on December 15, 2019 [6 favorites]

On Macintouch, I learned a few days ago that a fully loaded new Mac Pro costs more than a Corvette Coupe, $60,000+.

I literally bought a house for less than that.
posted by octothorpe at 9:09 AM on December 15, 2019 [2 favorites]

a fully loaded new Mac Pro costs more than a Corvette Coupe, $60,000+

It does shred cheese, after all!
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:23 AM on December 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

I literally bought a house for less than that.

I once got a piano for free!
posted by valkane at 9:32 AM on December 15, 2019 [6 favorites]

I chipped your tooth
Shaking grated cheese into your mouth
posted by phooky at 9:54 AM on December 15, 2019

1.5TB of RAM adds $25K to the Mac Pro purchase price. Curious - who would need that much memory?
posted by porn in the woods at 9:54 AM on December 15, 2019

1.5TB of RAM adds $25K to the Mac Pro purchase price. Curious - who would need that much memory?

I think the target market for this particular computer/build is someone who works in an industry where they do an incredible amount of video/music/image rendering. People who might work in the film or music industry and do a lot of technical work.
posted by Fizz at 10:08 AM on December 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

Or someone who has an insane amount of money and just likes to spend lavishly to have the latest most new shiny thing.
posted by Fizz at 10:08 AM on December 15, 2019 [3 favorites]

On Macintouch, I learned a few days ago that a fully loaded new Mac Pro costs more than a Corvette Coupe, $60,000+.

This is “pro” in the sense of a tractor-trailer: the target audiences are industries like film production where they’re billing $$$ and every minute saved is directly linked to that, and they’re generally all about massive data volume – imagine maxing one of these out and hooking it up to storage which still costs more. Most of the backlash has been from gamers and programmers quick to offer hot takes confidently asserting that nobody needs that much capacity because they personally don’t — it’s like asking why Peterbilt exists when an F-350 can go as fast.
posted by adamsc at 10:22 AM on December 15, 2019 [13 favorites]

The way it looks like she's never grated cheese, even with an actual cheese grater, is infuriating.
posted by humboldt32 at 10:28 AM on December 15, 2019 [4 favorites]

So I tried out the 16" MBP but it was pretty crap (two hangs coming out of sleep, shaky BT mouse tracking, idle temps in the mid-50s vs low 40s on my i7 box) so I returned it and just popped in an RX-5700 into my main hackintosh that was formerly stuck on High Sierra due to no Nvidia drivers any more.

Specced very similarly to the $4000 16" MBP but is running 10.15.2 so much better.

The BOM on a no-compromise DIY i9 box from newegg with 64GB of RAM and 3TB of storage comes in just under $2200, no reason Apple couldn't hit the $2500 pricepoint with a headless iMac Pro (which is a total rip-off at $5000).

I've been a loyal MacOS user since the late 80s but not loving the value proposition of Apple's x64 offerings this decade. Hopefully the ARM era will bring back some killer integrated desktops a la a decent "Amiga 1000" / LC III heavy hitter (for the price).
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 11:15 AM on December 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

Curious - who would need that much memory?

Ever trained a neural network? those things apparently eat memory for breakfast until they're optimized.
posted by pwnguin at 11:16 AM on December 15, 2019

Considering the amount of heat being diffused out that front grill, maybe it would work better as a panini press.
posted by JoeZydeco at 11:38 AM on December 15, 2019 [2 favorites]

Insanely Grate
posted by aws17576 at 12:03 PM on December 15, 2019 [3 favorites]

"Curious - who would need that much memory?"

Has some applications here. Biggest case I've heard of is some of the newer in-memory databases.
posted by aleph at 12:35 PM on December 15, 2019 [2 favorites]

Yep. The one I'm personally familiar with is modelling of weather and re/insurance contracts. Traditionally you'd use a cluster and write intermediate results to disk so you're very I/O bound - if you can do it in memory on a single machine you can get vast speedups.
posted by kersplunk at 1:01 PM on December 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

Oh, the scientific/engineering speedups for these simulations (or many many others (design tools?)) can be huge. Just became possible with the growth in easy memory. But I was thinking all the Commercial and Social Web sites would dominate with their in-memory databases. Maybe hybrids with in-memory and eventually sync to disk.
posted by aleph at 1:11 PM on December 15, 2019

This is “pro” in the sense of a tractor-trailer: the target audiences are industries like film production where they’re billing $$$ and every minute saved is directly linked to that, and they’re generally all about massive data volume

Would this really get you more compute power than $60,000 of rack-mounted server?
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 1:31 PM on December 15, 2019

Good news! Soon, it will itself be available as a $60,000 (ish) rack-mounted server

As for the 1.5 TB of memory, I remember a demonstration shortly after the reveal where it was shown that someone from Pixar had loaded the entirety of Toy Story 4 into RAM simultaneously. Like, every single location and model. This is not a computer for us mere mortals, heh.

looking upthread I think “insanely grate” would have better as “grate insanely” and anyway thanks for coming to my TED talk
posted by DoctorFedora at 2:25 PM on December 15, 2019 [3 favorites]

Would this really get you more compute power than $60,000 of rack-mounted server?
This. I can think of plenty of applications for this much computer, but still struggle to think of why they would require this specific computer. Or OSX. I guess I know more scientists than media peeps these days.
posted by aspersioncast at 2:33 PM on December 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

i'm sure there are science applications for this machine but it's definitely aimed primarily at professional video and audio houses. one use case for this machine: currently to record a full orchestra using logic (which is an application owned and developed by apple) professional composers often have to use rigs where several different macs are wired together, each with say, a quarter of the total tracks. logic on a fully upgraded mac pro can work with something like a 2 hour, 200 track project without any issues.
posted by JimBennett at 3:08 PM on December 15, 2019 [4 favorites]

Jonathan Morrison's Mac Pro review video is a good demonstration of who can benefit from this much computing power (in this case, recording engineers in a music studio using Logic).
posted by good in a vacuum at 4:28 PM on December 15, 2019 [2 favorites]

4K uncompressed video editing and video effects processing in real time. That’s the target application for there workstations. Also, to maxed out model has the $2K Afterburner card which is, again, for uncompressed video rendering.

I am actually talking to my org about buying one to replace out 7 year old Mac Pro trashcan, which we bought when it first came out and paid $10K for. The performance increase alone is worth the price.
posted by daq at 5:06 PM on December 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

Also, 1.5 TB of RAM is hard to find outside of server class hardware. Most servers do not support graphic cards (let alone 2) with 32 Gb of VRAM for live rendering.
posted by daq at 5:10 PM on December 15, 2019

I love käse modding videos.
posted by xris at 5:52 PM on December 15, 2019 [4 favorites]

Would this really get you more compute power than $60,000 of rack-mounted server?

Speaking strictly in terms of FLOPS or IOPs or IPS, probably not, but like people above mention, the real-time aspect is key for the workloads this computer is tailored for. I can’t imagine that putting a NIC in between one’s workstation and a compute node would be worthwhile for such use cases, no matter how fast the interconnect. That said, given that, I can’t really imagine why you’d get it in rack-mount form.
posted by invitapriore at 6:14 PM on December 15, 2019

+++ OUT OF CHEESE ERROR. REDO FROM START. +++
posted by pompomtom at 6:25 PM on December 15, 2019 [5 favorites]

Mac Pros have always offered the ability to max out the specs to new-car pricing tiers. There’s clearly a market for it, else Apple would have stopped offering it long ago. Pointing this out is not useful criticism of Apple or the Mac Pro.
posted by Doleful Creature at 6:51 PM on December 15, 2019 [2 favorites]

Most of the backlash has been from gamers and programmers quick to offer hot takes confidently asserting that nobody needs that much capacity because they personally don’t

I don't see people claiming nobody needs 1.5TB of RAM so much as that Apple is overcharging for 1.5TB of RAM. Is that true? Dunno, haven't tried to buy 1.5TB of RAM before!
posted by atoxyl at 7:01 PM on December 15, 2019

I assume to the target market it doesn't really matter if there's a bit of a markup over the wholesale cost of the memory.
posted by atoxyl at 7:04 PM on December 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

The new MacOS, 10.15 aka Catalina, is largely incompatible with many if not most of the third-party “pro” applications that could not only benefit from the upgraded specs but have been largely surpassing Mac performance on Win10 and even Linux. Sure, Logic works great; sure, Final Cut X works well, especially with finished Dolby Vision masters; but for those in the Mac sphere waiting patiently for killer Avid/Pro Tools/Creative Cloud/DaVinci Resolve boxes, this box runs nothing, because those apps (and much of the corresponding high-speed storage networking stack) simply don’t work with Catalina yet. Even Final Cut can’t edit or grade Dolby Vision yet.

I hate open-world-esque video games where there are crude level gates that force the player to complete dungeons before unlocking another section of the “open” world. Turns out I hate tech firms who level gate to enforce platform lock-in even more. Right now I’m dealing with a piece of gear which uses a custom cable to factory reset, a NAS which requires a hardware dongle to enable an automation framework that’s basically rsync, and myriad Apple workstations from the last three years hobbled so as not to cannibalize sales of the Mac Pro high-end workstation that didn’t really exist until last week. Mac Pro (2019) may be pretty and nostalgic and user-expandable and a return to the years when Apple could do no wrong... but this new machine is a soulless, rent-seeking status symbol for creatives incapable of adapting.
posted by infinitewindow at 7:18 PM on December 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

The new MacOS, 10.15 aka Catalina, is largely incompatible with many if not most of the third-party “pro” applications [...] but this new machine is a soulless, rent-seeking status symbol for creatives incapable of adapting

That's a bit much! macOS finally dropping support for 32-bit binaries is a good thing, and it's the fault of app developers that they had not yet moved away from using Carbon in the *7* years since Apple announced that Carbon was deprecated, would be discontinued, and should no longer be used. If their code was too tightly coupled to make that feasible, then it was probably crap software anyway and we're better off without it.

At any rate, these companies are probably scrambling right now to get Catalina compatible apps out the door, and the mac pro looks great to me! Wish my company would buy me one.
posted by dis_integration at 8:01 AM on December 16, 2019 [3 favorites]

I don't see people claiming nobody needs 1.5TB of RAM so much as that Apple is overcharging for 1.5TB of RAM. Is that true? Dunno, haven't tried to buy 1.5TB of RAM before!

So the other day after an upgrade at work that doubled the ram in a 24-node cluster from 384gig to 768gig per node, I went off to look and it was only like $100k to 115k-ish for 18tb of ram total. But the HP G10s weren't bleeding edge memory, it's just a lot of 32gig DDR4-2400 sockets. The high end Mac Pro fills twelve 128gig DDR4-2933 RDIMMs, mmmph maybe $1300-$1800 for each of those depending on what level of support you're buying? Apple's $2,000 per-RDIMM isn't _completely_ extravagant by those measures? I mean I can't get datacenter support pricing for HPE memory offhand, but given that over-the-counter retail supermicro/crucial memory gets me the $1300-$1800 range, it's not unreasonable in a business context.

That raises that professional support is a totally legitimate question, too - my $50k rack mounted servers have 6 hour SLAs, 24/7/365, something breaks and a dude is dispatched to swap out parts until it works again. Applecare is great and all, but I haven't seen if they're offering uplifted support contracts for these monsters. I'm sure any environment that has any number of them also probably has dedicated site personnel, but the whole same day immediate parts dispatch so your failed node isn't down for a week is a Very Big Thing.

And all this in a package that doesn't sound like it's trying to take off with all the fans? Unf.
posted by Kyol at 8:20 AM on December 16, 2019 [2 favorites]

professional composers often have to use rigs where several different macs are wired together, each with say, a quarter of the total tracks.

Really? That must be a lot of tracks or a lot of processing - just recording a stream to disc my lowish-end hackintosh can handle 32 simultaneous tracks in Logic with a normal prosumer RME soundcard. The theoretical limits of PCIe should be a lot higher than that without any huge RAM/processor hit.

I still wouldn't assume this would be the ideal application for such a machine, but hell, if you're doing professional soundtrack work and tracking every instrument individually I could see it getting really resource-intensive, and if you're paying a professional orchestra by the hour . . .

So I guess in perspective this just doesn't seem that crazy - it's a lot of computer, with a bit of Apple Tax markup that might very well be worth it in terms of e.g. providing your staff with a familiar OS.
posted by aspersioncast at 11:55 AM on December 16, 2019

I don't see people claiming nobody needs 1.5TB of RAM so much as that Apple is overcharging for 1.5TB of RAM. Is that true? Dunno, haven't tried to buy 1.5TB of RAM before!

You should probably hold off purchasing until they can remember it for you wholesale.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 4:01 PM on December 16, 2019

it's the fault of app developers that they had not yet moved away from using Carbon in the *7* years since Apple announced that Carbon was deprecated, would be discontinued, and should no longer be used. If their code was too tightly coupled to make that feasible, then it was probably crap software anyway and we're better off without it.

How do you figure? If a program works and does something worthwhile, how does changing the OS infrastructure out from under it make it retroactively a bad program?
posted by straight at 5:14 PM on December 16, 2019