I think this is the droid they were looking for…
1000th post!
The internal shots show the depth and breadth of engineering that went into effectively packing that much power into the cylindrical form factor - yet the outside somehow manages to look under-considered.
I think the shiny black bothers me too…I wonder if that outer sheath (the black cylinder) is plastic or metal?
When I think of shiny black technology I immediately think of Microsoft (particularly X-box)
Come to think of it - when I think of flat mobile operating systems I think of Windows Phone.
Wait a second… what just happened here?!
Slow clap…
Nifty as a design exercise.
As a product? Pretty lame.
None of the practicality of a desktop (What you want to add a hard drive because you edit videos like most people who use a Mac Pro? Stick it outside!) no clear upgrade path of the internals besides the RAM (at least the SSD is on a separate card, but I’m sure it’s got proprietary firmware to prevent you from changing it).
For the amount it’s going to cost it’s pretty disappointing, but I guess the Mac Pro hasn’t really wowed anyone for any point in time recently, so they might as well try something new for the dying desktop market.
… but I already have a waste basket.
And what wastes more desktop space than a circle?
I don’ get it Lussie.
I love that they took the old turbine design that was twisted into a briefcase with handles, and reduced it to just a pure vertical turbine. Totally awesome. And what’s more, the turbine isn’t too polarizing because the vents are hidden and/or restrained.
Seriously guys, did you even click that link? Pretty impressive convergence of design and engineering, even by Apple standards. The housing is aluminum (another thing you see when you click the link). Gloss anodized black? Or black chrome?
And conversely LMO, what is more efficient, psychologically and volumetrically, than a circle? My desk isn’t a grid of stacks of rectangles, and I would welcome this object onto it.
I’d love to own one with a Cintiq instead of an iMac, if 5-10K falls into my lap sometime soon. Frankly, I’m glad they had the guts to make it a cylinder. They’ve rarely listened to the myopic critics in the past. Why stop now?
Am I detecting a new design trend from apple? Faceless computing monoliths?
Apple’s new Airport Extreme
Well, nothing seems far from any other screen-less products they’ve released lately. Apple TV, Mac Mini, power bricks, connectors, etc. Turn off your iphone/ipad, it’s a faceless monolith.
If you really want an ATX form factor Mac you can always build your own Hackintosh. 
It’s a pretty odd direction, I will say that. I’d be interested to see how it looks with all sorts of peripherals plugged into it, rather than encased in a glass cylinder.
It’s interesting that I wanted to use a turbine-like graphic in a logo 3-4 years ago. Hmmm.
I think the ventilation element is interesting, but as Lew said, there is nothing here that required the round form factor.
The shiny black is kinda weird too. I thought everything Apple was supposed to be white?
I’m divided.
I’m glad its a new take on a desktop workhorse, there are plenty of sheet metal boxes with ample expansion ports. If there are real and true performance gains and smokes everything else on the market then I would call it a success. And I mean real world performance, not some stat sheet full of specs.
I’m concerned about its proprietary bits and its lack of an upgrade path, but that is the case with every Apple product. I don’t really mind the need to look elsewhere for large platter storage. At work I have a server and at home I have a NAS.
I will agree that its a pretty amazing piece of design + engineering. I can’t think of another MFG who is doing something similar.
Maybe this guy from back in the day…sort of…
But even that is just a fancy box without any real advancement in the architecture.
I wonder what the brainstorming process was?
“How about a rectangle with fillets?”
“I are you kidding me? We’ve soaked that one to death.”
“A cube?”
“Don’t make walk over there and beat you.”
“A ball?”
“Sure. And have it roll off the table? Numbnutz.”
“A pyramid?”
“What are you? Some sort of new-age freak? This is northern CA, not Sedona.”
“Dodecahedron?”
“Now I am going to get up to beat you.”
“Cylinder?”
“Good. We’re done here.”
I immediately thought if this, until I saw the whole thing.
Right now it feels like a student project. It’s willing to go crazy and take risks, and some people like it and some people think it misses the point of why the current line is successful. Unlike a student project though it has been taken by one of the best engineering teams in the world and is being brought to market. I feel that best thing to do is wait till people get their hands on it and see if their target audience accepts it.
Am I missing something, or is this the first Apple product in recent history to not have any logo or other branding on it?
Hey I had an O2 - it was awesome.
Not only was the design sleek (if you’re the sole platform for Alias surfacing, you better have some sweet surfacing on your case) - but the inside was super well designed. Modular sub components, completely tool free design (which in the 90’s was unheard of), it was totally proprietary but a few people modded them to work with ATX hardware. And considering how much horsepower was in it, it was very small for the time. I’d LOVE to still have one of those on my desk.
This post wouldn’t be shocking if it didn’t come out of a IDer’s mouth. It’s rare these days for our profession to be so tightly integrated with engineering to the point where projects aren’t just some warmed over styling exercise or a PDF full of things that a client should do but never will because they lack the balls or the capability to pull off.
But you’re right, it is a cylinder…pfft I mean come on, I bet the feature tree is just one feature!
Shocking?
I’m not allowed to amuse myself at the expense of Apple?
Oh. OK.
As I see it it the cylindrical form comes from the ventilation design. Given the size of those two AMD FirePro cards it seems to be a form that gives a small foot print while maintaining the “air shaft” idea.
They should sell expandable modules to turn it into a space heater or vacuum cleaner.
Yes, of course you can do whatever you like and Apple is fun to make fun of, just look how self serious Jony is in that pitch video, you’d swear its a mock commercial.
That being said, I actually get excited when someone actually pulls something like this off.