New Mac Pros and Mac Minis Launching in August

Can i plug my own screen and etc. to the mac mini?

Yep. They've always been BYODKM (Bring you own display, keyboard and Mouse).

Exactly.

15 years ago a professional needed the fastest and the brightest of Macs to do his work. Today a graphic designer can get away with a cheap iMac, or even Mac Mini if he wishes so.

People who need a Mac Pro are a minority now. And they will keep needing it so Mac Pro's will be made, but they will only be maintained like Apple has been doing lately.

Bull, bull and more bull.

People should stop basing your view of the world on tv ad's. In the real-world over here, we buy a couple Mac Pro's every few months for designers, video editors, etc, etc. Nobody wants to work on a laptop or iMac. At first it sounds fun, but then you realize how bottle-necked you are. Suddenly everyone is fighting to *not* use an iMac or MacBook.

So much for the minority theory. And I hardly think Apple would be refreshing Mac Pro's after only a year if this statement was even close to reality.

(I'm not speaking to you personally, but more to the idea that you're offering. Sorry if it sounded otherwise)

I bet the Mac Pro will be redesigned into a rack-mountable case. It's been a looooong time since a major redesign.

nearly 8 years

Remove the optical drive bay, remove a couple PCIe slots, add a few Thunderbolt ports, add a couple 2.5" drive bays, and make everything SATA3. Shrink the size by half.

Why?

There are still no Sandy Bridge CPUs suitable for Mac Pro. Unless Apple is looking for a significant change (drop DP models, basically a headless iMac), there is nothing to update.

Today a graphic designer can get away with a cheap iMac, or even Mac Mini if he wishes so.

'Get away with' being the operative phrase, even for women designers. ;)

Some of us like a little more headroom, expandability, flexibility and like their Macs to last for a while. iMacs don't offer much in the way of display choice, consistency and quality; Minis are saddled with pokey slow little drives and limits on RAM as the Creative Suite and other apps become ever-increasing resource hogs with each new iteration. A publication I'm working on right now, with templates from the publisher, are choking my MBP because the running heads and masthead are choked with hundreds of vector points, embedded into the InDesign file.

In my case, I've also got almost 2TB of current and archived work, almost half a lifetime worth of stuff that I'd rather not have stashed across a spider's web of external drives.

Possibly new Mac Pros on the way? Best news for ages. Don't ever let anyone tell anyone else here that no-one needs a Mac Pro.

You're probably right, thus at the same time it means there's no future in professional Macs, so we should all just be looking for an exit strategy.

Apple is indeed not interested in Macs. Rightly or wrongly.

That's utter nonsense. Just because Apple does not spend money on new case designs for Mac Pro's, doesn't mean there's no future in professional Macs. Apple is spending a lot of money and effort on their Pro Apps. For whom? Professionals who use workstations, and Apple workstations since Apple Pro Apps don't run on Windows.

Professional workstations will always exist. If Apple decides to stop producing Mac Pro's that means either their iMacs have become fast enough for anyone to do professional work, in that case we won't need a Mac Pro anymore, or they also abandoned all their Pro App business together with it as well. I don't see any of it happening any time soon.

You mean Mac Mini? There is just no reason for me to have a huge Mac Pro anymore. Maybe there will be internal Thunderbolt ports/peripherals.

Fixed.

There is a still a sizable market for the Pro Workstation. The mini simply cannot hold a candle to a true Xeon/Modular Workstation.

It's not Apple's fantasy. Have you been blind to what was happening around you the last couple of years? Have you heard about Android? Windows Mobile?

Yeah, in passing. I've still not met anyone who's ditched his/her PC for any of those devices.

Thus, no Post-PC era, since PC are aplenty and quite dominant. The iOS devices and Android/WindowsMobile are quite capable complements to the PCs - no doubt. But one would have to be quite out there to claim in all seriousness that there is now a Post-PC era.

The same guy who claimed that, also claimed in 2005 that now was the year of HD. To this day, he hasn't made BD support available in Macs. I would take whatever comes out of Steve Jobs' mouth with a grain of salt.

A graphic designer doesn't have much use for 12 cores, not even 4 cores for the most of the time.

Some of us like to rip stuff while they're working. ;) Cores aren't the only factor as I've pointed out.

Illustrator, Indesign, these tools don't require cores nor do they make use of them. Photoshop is the only software that makes use of extra cores, and it does make use of them only if you are applying a filter.

I'm working today and have about 20 apps open, one of them slowly rendering. Not just Illustrator and InDesign. I've already explained what the limitations of iMacs and Minis are.

I know graphic designer who use Photoshop only for retouching and cleaning photos up. That does not require any extra cores.

Some of us do a bit more than retouching and cleaning photos up. Please don't presume to tell me or the many professionals I work with what our computing needs are... and I won't do the same for you.

New Mac Pros (possibly). You can't spin it any other way than good news for those who want to buy a new one... with Thunderbolt.