They are usually soldered to the system board and the heat/cool cycle isn’t great for that.
They really should be in a cpu like socket. Mine 17 beast isn’t a bulky as a toughbook but it does get toasty if the GPU is running.
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I love that you’re still getting great value out of your cheese grater! It’s so bizarre to me that they didn’t just do a goddamned tower refresh. Half the point of going x86 was to be able to use high-end parts, Jesus!
Here’s my Apple litany:
• pro desktop
• pro laptop
• new display would be nice
• NVIDIA as option, or even standard in the “pro” machines
• Up-to-date Mac minis, I mean, once a year would be swell guys (thanks Boris!)
I’ve long gotten over killing off servers, Mac OS X Server (for nearly all intents and purposes), and a ton of other things. But damn, the above they could do in HALF A SECOND, they would sell MORE product, HIGH MARGIN product, and it would really take essentially zero resources. It’s OBNOXIOUS.
And yes, I felt the need to use all of those caps.
The external video card should be part of the monitor.
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My two year old Lenovo laptop at work can not hold a candle to my 2010 iMac. It’s annoying.
The new iMacs are great pieces of hardware but garbage in my book for not being able to swap out ram, hard drives, or a component or two. HDDs die and there should be zero reason for me to have to bring it to a store when I am capable of swapping one out.
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Preach! Amen! 
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Per that link, it should come for “free” for graphics rendering performance (e.g. games) as long as you’ve got a display attached to the eGPU, have it set as the primary display, and are running the game on that display.
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Seriously, I bought my last mini and was agog to learn I cannot add RAM. THANKS GUYZ.
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The Mac Pro (modular or cylinder) represents something like 1% of Apple’s mac sales. Most of those are bought not by individuals but companies which spec them out the way they want and don’t upgrade them afterwards. So upgradability and modularity is a trait sought by a fraction of a percent of their customers. The stagnant state of the professional mac is partly due to disarray inside apple, if reports are to be believed, but also partly due to the size of the market being so tiny, which reduces the budget for enginerring new hardware.
Apple was right to retire the old cheese grater mac pro. Going all in on solid state storage was a right move. Eliminating PCI slots and hard drive bays in order to make a smaller, quieter, more energy efficient machine was a right move. Making it impossible to upgrade the GPU was a wrong move. Failing to make available an add on box for people who needed PCI slots or spinning storage was a wrong move. One hopes that they learned their lesson and the forthcoming newer mac pro corrects some of those mistakes.
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Feel feel better about the fact that it likely hasn’t been updated past the one you have anyway, if you bought it in the past decade (slight exaggeration), so at least you still have the state of the art!
Edit: In fact, you literally just reminded me of the thing I meant to add to my Apple litany, and then had a brain fart and couldn’t remember. Adding now!
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This, my friend, is total bullshit. People, and pardon my french, fucking kickstart shit way more intense than such an effort 100 times a day. Apple is the largest and most profitable company on planet Earth.
And while the actual percent sold of pro machines is small, it could be a very (even for Apple standards) high margin line, and also a showcase line. Apple NEVER used to have a problem courting the pro market, and granted, that’s when it was 95% of their user base, in a struggling period. But still, catering to that end of the market was always important to Apple.
Then they really fucked with it. They didn’t have to keep backing servers and RAIDs and MAMs and sever OSes, sure. But they didn’t have to handle the legacy FCP to “new” FCP so poorly. They could have kept a pro desktop line going with ZERO effort. They could have a laptop line that gasp has the form-factor of the MOST RECENT previous generation, with actual pro specs. They didn’t have to 100% sever their relationship with NVIDIA. Etc. etc. etc. These actions had a certain – spitefulness, on display.
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Fucking A. Bring back the cheese grater Mac! That was a thing of beauty. The iCan is an engineering marvel, but as a product it’s an expensive abomination.
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That has not been my experience as a graphics professional for the last 25 years working with/for dozens of companies. One of the draws of the Mac platform has been that they were easily upgradable, very reliable (comparatively), and could very well have a useful life in the production pipeline for six years or more, while the Windows equivalents became too much of a headache after as little as two or three years.
You can’t build an Apple computer on a kickstarter budget. Both because they design all their logic boards (and nowadays quite a few of their chips) in house, and because of their distinctive and striking industrial design. Both are expensive and require significant amounts of engineering time to create.
Don’t forget that Tim Cook was Apple’s operational efficiency Czar before he became head of Apple. Under him, all hardware development decisions are made by weighing sales against engineering cost. If the spreadsheet numbers say you can justify the expense, you do it, if not, you don’t. After the 2010 cheese grater, it took Apple 4 years to get their new design of the Mac Pro out the door - an eternity in computer time - because the spreadsheet said they couldn’t allocate enough engineers to the project to get it out any faster. Ditto with the forthcoming newer mac pro - which will go on sale four, maybe five years since the previous version.
Cook should have realized that the Mac Pro is like Ferrari fielding an F1 racing team - it doesn’t necessarily make financial sense for the company to do it, but it does make strategic sense. Apple remembered that the Mac Pro could be a showcase for dazzling displays of technological prowess (hence every aspect of the 2014 model), but lost sight of the fact that it also needs to be a credible Mac candidate for “fastest, most powerful desktop money can buy.”
Last year was the second time Apple has had to break their veil of secrecy and tell the world that they are working on a new mac pro - the first time was back in 2012, when Cook was forced to admit that Apple was working on a new MP to replace the ageing 2010 design. One hopes that this time they have taken the lesson to heart.
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They literally could have KEPT UPGRADING THE CHEESE GRATER and people would have been satisfied. I have been following Apple for basically my entire life, I have worked with them professionally for many years. I have probably sold thousands of them, exclusively to professionals, and major corporations and other organizations. With all of this in mind, my perspective is that they willfully have neglected the actual needs of the pro market, and it would have only brought them more net profit had they not.
My argument is in line with @NickyG There is room for both. They could easily have a Mac Pro that has all the upgradeability and configuration options that a standard Win desktop has. The trash can was someone’s dumb idea. I like how it looked, but it failed as a piece of hardware. The iMac not he other hand…it doesn’t have to be like it is!!! They have turned it into an expensive iPhone…a disposable piece of tech. NO NO NO. There is no reason it can’t be a little thicker, have a slot for a graphics card. Have a slot for an HDD and an SSD to be easily replaced/swapped. I SHOULD BE ABLE TO PUT RAM IN IT FOR CHRIST’S SAKE!!!
I mean…that right there! The new iMacs you cannot even add ram in them without taking it to a professional/apple store…WTF IS THIS BULLSHIT.
The iMac is a great design and really they should recognize what it is…a standard all around home use desktop. I don’t want nor have the disposable income to buy one every 3 years to keep up with GPU changes or RAM upgrade needs. I don’t want to have to throw it away because the hard drive failed or a port died. There is zero reason for this thing to not be upgradeable like any average home use desktop. I had a Mac pro grater from 2001-2010…then bought a 27" iMac and have been using that every day since. I am a designer and developer. I code, I use Adobe CS, I game on this iMac and my old G5 is still a back up storage machine. I do not need a new computer that has 8 hdd slots or room for 3 GPUs or whatever…I just want to be able to put in more ram when I need it and upgrade the gnu card when it becomes outdated. This just isn’t a big ask.
I hope Apple has gotten there head dislodged from their own asses. I am not optimistic.
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Two things:
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Apple’s scale has shifted, and with it, how well something needs to sell to justify its continued existence has shifted. Someone did the numbers and based on what Apple revealed to the press when they announced that they were working on a newer Mac Pro, they’re selling something like 200,000 cylinder mac pros per year. Back in the early 00’s, that was a big number because Apple was only selling a few million macs per year, total. Today, that’s a very tiny number because Apple is selling 20 million macs per year, and hundreds of millions of phones per year.
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Just continuing to sell cheese graters would never sit well with Apple because it’s not forward thinking, it’s not cutting edge. Discarding obsolete technologies before they have died is instinctive with them, they can’t not do stuff like that. The cheese grater was a relic of the era of spinning hard disks and add in cards. Apple got it right when they went for all solid state storage in the cylinder MP. They got it right when they got rid of PCI slots and opted for a small, quiet single fan design.
On the other hand, They got it slightly wrong when they did nothing whatsoever (like an add on box) for the shrinking number of pro customers who still need internal spinning disk storage and add in cards. And they got it very wrong when they failed to design the cylinder MP with enough thermal overhead to allow for hotter GPUs and multiple CPUs.
I hope you are not speaking literally. Dead macs command a good price on Ebay and elsewhere as “for parts/repair” items.
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The pro customers are a small but key part of the Apple ecosystem, pushing them away removes future technological content, the pro individuals are also likely to provide tech support for other apple users.
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Yes, that’s what I was thinking of when I said upthread that Apple needs to treat the Mac Pro like Ferrari treats its F1 team - as a product that doesn’t make financial sense on a spreadsheet, but is still something they have to do and do well for a bunch of strategic reasons, not least being that the people who want to own one are the creators of most mac software and the most devoted apple evangelists.
