Turn any Thunderbolt-equipped Mac into a Mac Pro

High-end media producers have become concerned about the future of Apple's Mac Pro, for two reasons:

1. The Mac Pro hasn't received a major update in years, and
2. Apple withdrew the Mac Pro from Europe on March 1st because it doesn't meet European safety regulations.

It's entirely possible that Apple plans to update or replace the Mac Pro later this year--but it's also possible that this is it for the Mac Pro. That makes ways to expand Apple's other models even more important. For the past couple of years, Apple has touted its 10Gbps Thunderbolt interface as the expansion interface for media producers, but Thunderbolt docks have been very slow in coming to the market.

Engadget reports that Sonnet, which already offers a line of Thunderbolt expansion chassis, adapters and disk arrays, has introduced the Echo 15 dock, with the widest array of interfaces I've seen. It includes:

• Four USB 3.0 ports
• Two eSATA ports
• One Thunderbolt port (in addition to the Thunderbolt connection to the host computer)
• One Gigabit Ethernet port
• One FireWire 800 port
• A DVD or Blu-Ray drive
• Room to mount a 2.5" or 3.5" SATA drive internally

The Echo 15's prices will range $399.95 for the DVD-equipped model with no hard drive to $549.95 for the model with a Blu-Ray drive and 2TB hard drive. Sonnet is taking pre-orders at its website and expects to begin shipments this summer. The Echo 15 is priced very competitively compared to docks from Belkin and Matrox that have fewer ports and no optical or hard drives.

 

Apple's WWDC announcements--the 60,000-foot view

At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference keynote today, the company completely refreshed its notebook computers and introduced an important new model, got OS X Mountain Lion ready for release next month, and previewed iOS 6. Rather that dig deep into all the new products' features and functions, I'm going to focus on a high-level view:

• The future of Apple's notebooks: Apple announced its MacBook Pro with Retina Display, which represents the future direction for all of Apple's notebooks. It's slightly thicker than a MacBook Air, yet it has as much or more processing and graphics power than the top-of-the-line "classic" MacBook Pro, which remains in the product line. It also has a 15.4" Retina Display with 2880 x 1800 resolution, four times as much as the "classic" 15" MacBook Pro.
• Hard drives are dead: Every MacBook model now comes with flash memory rather than a hard disk, with a minimum of 256GB on most models to a maximum of 768GB on the new Retina Display model.
• USB 3 is in, Thunderbolt is still around, and FireWire is on the way out: All MacBooks now have USB 3 interfaces, which are backward-compatible with USB 2. There are far more USB 3-compatible peripherals on the market than Thunderbolt-compatible models, and they're less expensive. On the other hand, the handwriting is definitely on the wall for FireWire: The MacBook Pro with Retina Display drops both FireWire 800 and Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. Instead, Apple is offering Thunderbolt to FireWire 800 and Gigabit Ethernet adapters. 
• OS X is looking more and more like iOS: Mountain Lion includes integration with iCloud, a notifications center, and Messages, Reminders and Notes apps, all of which were first implemented in iOS. Dictation is built into Mountain Lion and works in all apps, much like dictation in the new iPad. Links, images and video can be shared with a new share button in every window, much like Android. The updated Safari browser has a unified "smart search" field, like Chrome, and a Tabview feature, taken from Mobile Safari.
• "Fix Siri, integrate Facebook, replace Google Maps, and clean up everything else": From today's presentations, those seem to be the central goals that Apple has for iOS 6. Siri is going to be more tightly integrated into iOS 6 and will become a key component of integration with automobile telematics systems, so it has to work much better than it currently does. Facebook is going to be integrated as completely into iOS 6 as Twitter is. Google Maps will be replaced with Apple's own Maps application, including real-time traffic, turn-by-turn navigation, Siri integration and Flyover mode, with 3D renderings of cities around the world. Other features, such as FaceTime and phone calling, will be improved.
• With today's announcements, Apple is sanding off the remaining rough edges of its operating systems, and keeping its hardware at the leading edge. The true innovations, if they arrive, will come later this year, not at WWDC.

Apple's new iMacs and Mac Pros need better I/O

There have been a lot of negative comments in the media production community about Apple's new Mac Pro tower computers and iMacs. The new models are faster and have better graphics than the models they replaced, but they have the same I/O capabilities, and in the case of the Mac Pro, the same number of slots as the old models.

Many observers were looking for Apple to introduce USB 3.0 interfaces or the 1.6/3.2 Gbps FireWire standard, and were disappointed. I suspect that one big reason why Apple didn't implement USB 3.0 is that Intel is moving very slowly to support the new standard. Intel's motherboard chip sets, which are by far the most popular, still don't include USB 3.0 support, although USB 3.0 cards can be added. Yesterday, Intel announced that it had completed development of all the components necessary to implement 50 Gbps transfers over a single fiber-optic link. Intel calls this technology the Silicon Photonics Link (SPL,) and expects to have it available commercially within five years. This looks like the latest version of Light Peak, which was reportedly developed by Intel at Apple's request.

My suspicion is that SPL is what Apple is really waiting for. With SPL, Apple could attach many high-speed devices that currently need different interfaces, such as disk arrays, displays and audio/video capture devices, using a single interface. Apple doesn't want to encourage adoption of slower interfaces that it will replace in a few years' time with SPL. However, the problem is timing. If SPL is two years out, Apple might be able to hold out, but if it's really five years away, they can't wait that long for a faster interface. I don't believe that S1600/S3200 FireWire is an option; Apple has wanted to drop its FireWire interfaces for years and has kept them only because of strong pressure from the user community.

There's another issue, and it concerns how the iMacs and Mac Pros coexist in Apple's product line. The new iMacs, which come standard with Core i3 or i5 CPUs and can be ordered with i7 CPUs, are fast enough for most media production tasks, but they're crippled by slow I/O. For example, there are very few ways to get high-speed video into or our of an iMac; MacBook Pros have better I/O options because they support Expresscards, while iMac users are limited to USB 2.0 and FireWire.

An iMac or MacBook Pro with a couple of USB 3.0 interfaces, or in the future, a SPL interface, would make the Mac Pro obsolete except for highly specialized applications. Once Apple's notebook and desktop computers have extremely fast I/O, they will be able to do perhaps 95% of what a Mac Pro can do. I think that one big reason why the Mac Pro hasn't had the massive redesign that it's needed for a few years is that Apple sees it as eventually going away.

The viability of Apple's desktop and tower computers for high-end media creation depends in large part on how Apple solves its I/O issues. It can't wait five years for SPL; it's got to come up with something much sooner than that.