Tumble, coil & fumble

It’s that time of the year with rumors flying about Apple thinking about discontinuing the Mac Pro.

I for one think that’s a good idea.

Let’s face it, what do we really need big towers for? They’re loud, clunky, generate load of heat, cost a fortune in power bills, delivery takes up huge amounts of extra gas.

What do I want? A Mac mini Pro. Reduced to the max. Take away all the crap a professional doesn’t need. Make it the Leica of workstations. A sexy black metal box that generates less noise than a gecko fart.

What should be in it? A CPU with on-board graphics and basic sound, stereo jack and optical. RAM, of course. The entire back-side of the new chassis could be filled with up to 20GB of sticks. A fast SSD of 512GB. That’s it.

Now to the interesting parts. Ports. Make the thing open wider than an altar boy at christmas. Thunderbolt all the way, 3 busses, video on a separate 4th. Thunderbolt can be paired very effieciently allowing you to bundle across busses for super high speed. Then another purely optical speed, for some fierce near-range storage.

The Thunderbolt bus separation also opens up a great way to hook up multiple external CPUs for more efficient cooling and near-line GPU clusters. You could essentially have something like ILM’s real-time fire sim on a sub $10K desktop.

For audio production this could get insane. The Tunderbolt port could be the intravenous hook-up to a set of Pro Tools|HDX cards or dedicated hardware to come.

As professionals in any field we have very specific needs. A Mac mini Pro would allow us to laser focus the workstation to exactly what we need and how we need it. A truly elegant, beautiful piece of equipment art. A Central Computing Unit.