[Part 2] 10 things that should be in Apple's next Mac Pro

6. eSATA external storage. Firewire 800, first introduced in 2003, just doesn't do it anymore for high-speed external storage and is beginning to become outdated. I need more options. 3Gb eSATA is coming out of the woodwork now as the new standard for super-high-speed drives, even as external drives and arrays that use it are coming down in price dramatically. Fiber is nice, too, but overkill for workstations. USB3 fiber isn't ready yet; eSATA is.
7. Strong video support: HDMI out. How about letting users present stuff on an HDTV without having to use an adapter? This feature would cost very little, but the coolness factor would be huge, right Steve? Besides, HDMI is already available on Apple TV, so we know it can be done.

In fact, while I'm wishing, why not add two HDMI out ports? Running two hi-def TVs from a Mac Pro over HDMI would be absurdly cool. This, of course, could be part of an extremely high-end video card option. I know Apple likes to have options when it comes to processors. Well, users like options when it comes to video cards. Some of us want a solid video card, others want the absolute fastest thing money can buy. I happen to want both.



The current Mac Pro with its access panel open and four hard drives installed.
8. 10GB Ethernet. If not now, when? If not Apple, who? 10GB Ethernet cards are coming down in price by around $100 a pop -- and they're even cheaper when integrated on the motherboard. The prices for switches that utilize them are also coming down. Maybe Apple doesn't have to put them on all new Mac Pro models, but wouldn't they be perfectly appropriate for top-of-the-line HD video rigs? How about Xgrid? The speed certainly helps.
Now, I know the question will arise: Who needs 10GB Ethernet? Something along those same lines was asked five years ago when Apple released the G4 models with 1GB Ethernet. Time flies.

9. Hardware RAID standard. A few months ago, Apple introduced a $1,000 add-on card that turns mild-mannered SATA ports on the Mac Pro into a hard-core RAID configuration. Now, it's time to build it in.

And with the ZFS file system expected to be part of the upcoming Leopard OS, RAID configurations should work even better. (ZFS, if you aren't familiar with it, offers a whole new way to handle storage, allowing large capacity, storage pooling, fast data snapshots and copy-on-write.)

10. Affordability. I'm not talking $399.99 Dell affordable, but drop the barrier to entry a bit. Perhaps you can offer something under $2,000 at the low end. No doubt, some additional PC gamers and tinkerers will come into the Apple fold if you have the fastest processor and a solid video card.

Oh, just one more thing: Let's not wait for Macworld San Francisco to get the next Mac Pro on store shelves. The holidays are coming, and I know of at least one computer geek who'd like to see something like this wrapped up with a bow on top.

Seth Weintraub is a global IT management consultant specializing in the technology needs of creative organizations, including The Paris Times, Omnicom and WPP Group. He has set up and managed cross-platform networks on four continents and is an expert in Active Directory/Open Directory PC and Macintosh integration.

[Part 1] 10 things that should be in Apple's next Mac Pro

October 12, 2007 (Computerworld) -- The recent word from The Inquirer that Apple may be hoarding all of Intel's new 45nm Penryn processors -- and possibly paying for the privilege -- has prompted a lot of speculation about the future of Apple's Mac Pro desktop lineup. Apple's professional machines, which now use Intel Xeon Cloverton chips topping out at 3 GHz, are called workstations by Apple and offer quad- and eight-core configurations. They're fast, and they sport professional prices to match, with top-of-the-line eight-core units starting at $3,997.

The latest generation of Mac Pros, although radically restyled on the inside when Apple jumped to Intel chips in 2006, look pretty much the same on the outside as they did when they sported PowerPC chips. But the expected move to Penryn -- at or before the next Macworld show in January -- could mean the first major change in Mac Pro design in years.


Apple's Mac Pro in its current incarnation.
Penryn is Intel's first chip under 45nm (compared with the 65nm processors now used) and offers a faster front-side bus, larger Level 2 caches, better energy efficiency and a new instruction set (SSE4) aimed at boosting media, gaming and graphics uses (download PDF).

As important for Mac fans, the new chip architecture allows some new possibilities in case design -- namely because the motherboard and cooling system could take up less space. The new chips could also mean the incorporation of new technologies such as Scan-Line Interleave (used for linking two or more video cards) and a faster front-side bus.

With that in mind, let's go through some of the things Mac users -- especially this Mac user -- would like to see in the next Mac Pro:

1. A new enclosure. Rumors abound that the now-familiar all-aluminum Mac Pro box -- brought over part and parcel from the original Power Mac G5 -- will finally be shrinking. Of course, I still expect Apple to house all of the latest goodies, so whatever Apple comes up with isn't going to rival the Mac Mini for portability either.

I'm looking for more audio/USB/Firewire ports up front, with space for four 3.5-in. internal drive slots and two 5.25-in. optical drives -- which are now offered on the current crop of Mac Pros. An easier-to-open case more like that found way back on the Power Mac G4 desktops would certainly be appreciated by systems administrators, along with a reduced weight and better handles for lugging around.

2. A Blu-ray option, not just for movie editing but also for storing 50GB of data on a single disc -- perfect for sending off major quantities of files (high-definition movies, anyone?) to a client or user. Although I never thought I'd say it, DVDs -- even double-sided ones that can hold up to 8GB of information -- are too small. It's time for Apple to get on board with the next level of optical drives.

As for using a Blu-ray drive for movies, the digital rights management associated with them might be too much to ask for. But they'd look pretty darn nice on Apple's 30-in. Cinema Display, now, wouldn't they?

3. Cooler but quieter systems. Those fans on current Mac Pros can sometimes be loud and annoying. Liquid-cooled enclosures, while more expensive, are a much more elegant solution. Heck, Apple even used that with late-generation Power Mac G5s, although there were some reports of leaks.

If Apple doesn't want to go back to that option, then it should turn the whole case into a heat sink. Whether it's on purpose or not, my MacBook Pro sometimes feels like one well-designed heat sink.

4. Less energy use. I love power, but I also love clean air and Middle East peace and all of that, so Apple, while you're at it, cut down our energy usage! It's nice not to have the lights dim when I turn on the computer. This should be doable, and former Vice President Al Gore, who's on your board of directors, will no doubt approve.

5. Penryn. I know what The Inquirer reported, and yes, it makes perfect sense that you'd want to offer the latest and greatest from Intel to your top-end customers. What better way to run cool and cut power consumption than with a 45nm Penryn chip? These babies are fast and efficient. The first widely distributed 45nm processors, nothing comes close to them in terms of speed per watt -- the main reason Apple moved to Intel in the first place.

And let's get there sooner rather than later. The Mac Pro has been out since August 2006, with only the addition of faster chips in April to update the line.

Part 2 - Getting More From Your High-Definition Movies

Comments From Paramount's CTO
Interactivity means development time and development resources. Paramount's chief technology officer, Alan Bell, sat down with me to answer a few questions. Given the emphasis on interactivity during the panel discussion, I found some of his answers intriguing. This summer, both Pramount Pictures and DreamWorks Animation switched from supporting Blu-ray and HD DVD to backing HD DVD exclusively.


PCW: What can you tell me about the direction you see interactivity going in?

Bell: It acts as a safety valve--things that didn't get put into the local disc can be introduced by a connection, such as language tracks and filmographies, and so forth. You have an open-ended capability to enrich the content on the disc. And you can build communities. The whole notion of building a community around activities is where Web 2.0 is going. Interactivity is an essential ingredient. With HD DVD, it's in place as a mandatory factor from the outset, so consumers will have it in their player without having to know to ask for it. And programmers can invest in developing content and ideas that rely on connectivity, having a clear idea of the publishing base.

PCW: Not having to ask for it brings up the point that people likely don't know what to ask for or anticipate asking for when it comes to player-based interactivity. Do you think it's too early for interactivity?

Bell: From a content owners view, the way you program the interactivity is far more simplified if you have more consistency, more predictability, and better interoperability. It's the "keep it simple" principal. We can deliver we want to deliver from the outset, with reliability and the results that we want. The technology being there from the outset is important from day one. It will take time for consumers to become educated on how to use features. People should pay attention that one format--HD DVD--has this in place. The other format [Blu-ray] will undoubtedly get it right. But with HD DVD, those who bought early players don't have to be concerned about whether the future titles that may exploit more of the available features will work on those players. It's a better proposition for the consumers.

PCW: What percentage of the titles you'll be coming out with in the next six months will have connected interactivity on them?

Bell: We haven't made any predictions on interactivity. Transformers will have interactivity features. The bonus materials of DVD--you pretty much let it go, you lose contact with it. Did the consumer watch them or not watch them? When you invest in the connectivity features, that means that after the title has been purchased by the consumer, there's another touchpoint [for the studio], where we connect back with the consumer. That can be about promotional and marketing content, it can be a transactional relationship for selling products, or it can be about social networking.

PCW: You mention investment. All of this interactivity is going to cost money to sustain from a studio perspective--and raises the question of how long studios will maintain the communities. For example, you put a disc in your player that's four or five years old--will all of the vaunted connectivity extras and community still be available?

Bell: Life is going to get more complicated and costly, even as it brings these added opportunities for studios to bring their content out in different ways. It will be common sense: A title issued X years ago where the interest has diminished--you'll move on to supporting more popular titles. You'll have to.

Part 1 - Getting More From Your High-Definition Movies

Interactivity is supposed to allow you new possibilities between your TV and high-def movies, but are those features ready for prime time? Plus: The head of Paramount Studios weighs in.

LOS ANGELES -- Interactivity is a hot topic in the world of high-def movie discs right now. The new interactive features will allow you to do more from your TV, but are they ready for prime time?

Two levels of interactivity are being discussed at the DisplaySearch HDTV Conference 2007 here this week. The first level, on-disc interactivity, refers to games and pop-up information intended to supplement the movie being played. The second level is Internet-connected interactivity such as social networking and sharing, shopping, and downloading extra content (for example, trailers, new features, audio tracks, and subtitle tracks).

What Players Can Do Now
Today's Blu-ray players already can handle on-disc interactivity (as in the case of the Liar's Dice game on Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean Dead Man's Chest). But of all existing devices that handle Blu-ray, only the PlayStation 3 currently can be upgraded to handle Internet-connected interactivity.

By contrast, all HD DVD players have an ethernet port and support Interent connectivity. Titles like Universal's Heroes and Evan Almighty permit you to do things like download content and shop.

Universal has said that 40 percent of consumers who bought the Heroes HD-DVD disc signed up for an online account. Given the geek appeal of this NBC series, I'm not astonished that this happened. But somehow I doubt that Evan Almighty will garner anywhere near that level of support.

The HD DVD camp is heavily promoting the fact that its network-connected interactivity is available today--and certainly Blu-ray has to play catch up on that front. Though Blu-ray is capable of providing similar features, development of the hardware and software needed to actually do so is lagging behind HD DVD's progress.

On the other hand, I question whether interactivity is truly meaningful at this point anyway. For instance, Andy Parsons, of the Blu-ray Disc Association, says, "Picture and sound are what motivates people to check out [high-definition movies]. Interactivity is difficult to explain to people; that's not what someone is going to the store to check out."

(Alan Bell, CTO of Paramount, discusses interactivity with PCW later in this story.)

Interactivity's Benefits Hard to Explain
Interactivity is difficult to sell to people. The community aspects of sharing bookmarks and rating collections--the selling points that the HD DVD camp is talking up--will gain steam only when we the technology attracts a critical mass of users who use the content and the ancillary social networking conceived around that content.

The same issue haunts the social networking components of Joost.com, the Web TV streaming site. Neither HD DVD nor Blu-ray is anywhere close to achieving the necessary critical mass.

For that matter, movie studios aren't fully primed to offer such connected, interactive features on a large scale either. So far, Universal is leading the pack: It introduced its U-Shop component tied to the release of Evan Almighty this week. So the ability to shop for Evan Almighty tie-ins will set off a stampede of consumers just dying to buy into a high-def format? It doesn't seem altogether likely.

Now, I admit: If I were a Star Trek fan with money to burn and I wanted to shop for memorabilia while watching the HD DVD release of the original series, I could see the U-Shop component being a fun and welcome novelty--for the first 10 minutes, anyway. But does the appeal of shopping via disc have staying power? The answer is not particularly clear to me at this point ...

Coming soon: Sub-$1000 HD DVD notebook

October 10, 2007 (PC World) -- Even though two formats are duking it out for dominance, Toshiba sees HD DVD adoption following a trajectory similar to other optical disc formats before it.

"We see history repeating itself," Carl Pinto, vice president of product development and product management at Toshiba, told an audience during a presentation at the DVD Forum conference in Los Angeles this week.

Just as DVD gained momentum first as a combo DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive, HD DVD will see its early momentum from HD DVD-ROM/DVD SuperMulti writer drives. Even though a slim writer was announced in January at CES and has shipped in Japan, Pinto says he doesn't expect HD DVD burners to gain steam until 2009 or 2010.

Price drops

Since HD DVD was first installed on a Toshiba Qosmio earlier this year, prices have fallen precipitously on notebooks equipped with an HD DVD drive. That early notebook debuted at $3000; today's prices hover at around $1,500.

By the end of the year, in time for Christmas, said Pinto, "you'll be able to buy notebook computers at retail stores for under $1000."

The price drops can be attributed to the normal technology march known as Moore's Law. In the past year, the progression of the underlying technology required for a DVD drive has been impressive. For example, a notebook that cost $3000 at the start of the year required about $400 in components (excluding the cost of the HD DVD drive -- a detail Toshiba is not surprisingly mum about) to handle HD DVD decoding, including the CPU and a graphics processor on a dedicated graphics card. By this fall, the mix of components necessary shifted to a CPU with integrated graphics processor and a hardware decoder, all for under $200. When winter 2008 rolls around, Toshiba expects to be able cut that price about in half again. "Our goal for the third quarter of 2008 is to bring that cost down to under $100," Pinto said. "We believe that using improvements in CPUs and graphics subsystems, we can reduce the cost of playing back HD DVD."

Toshiba plans to make HD DVD an option on most all of its notebook PCs over the course of the coming year. The company estimates more than 5 million HD DVD drives will ship on notebook PCs in the coming year as the technology becomes more accessible and the price becomes more affordable.

Review: Buffalo's 1TB, 4TB home or small office storage array

October 10, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Buffalo Technology is no novice at network-attached storage devices. Its previously released LinkStation and TeraStation models have all been well received, and the newest iteration, the TeraStation Pro II packs even more inside for better performance and a wider access.

Let's emphasize right off the bat that this isn't just a box of disks attached to a network. The TeraStation Pro II has smarts inside in the form of a Marvell Orion CPU, 128MB of memory and 4MB of flash -- which holds a version of Samba Linux. Unlike the PowerPC processor that ran the older TeraStation, Marvell's chips are promoted as "media vault platforms that allow users to instantly access rich multimedia and data content throughout the home."



The TeraStation Pro IIWhile you shouldn't disregard the home-use aspect of the TeraStation, the Pro lineup is actually aimed at small to midsize businesses -- especially in its available 1TB and 4TB sizes. As shipped, the TeraStation Pro II that I received contained four 250GB drives, for a grand total of 1TB, 650GB of which was usable storage space. It arrived configured for RAID 5 (of a possible RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10) for maximum data security with minimal drive redundancy.
In case you missed the seminar, RAID 0 writes data alternately to two drives for a bit of added speed; RAID 1 writes data to one drive and then makes a mirror image of it in the second drive for data protection; RAID 10 is a combination of RAID 1 and 0, writing alternately to, in this case, two drives and then mirroring their contents to the two other drives.

RAID 5 writes data across the four drives and keeps parity information about the contents of each drive. In this way, should one drive fail, you simply remove it and replace it (Buffalo will sell you spare drive trays if you want to keep extra drives at the ready), and your RAID 5 configuration will rebuild the data that you theoretically "lost" on the crashed drive while you're in operation. As you might suspect, getting all of that done is processor intensive but insourcing the overhead to the CPU and memory of the TeraStation, rather than your PC, makes it painless.

Painless also describes the installation. If you're willing to accept the default configuration, you'll be up and running in less than six minutes, waiting simply for the TeraStation to boot and then running through a minimal number of questions from the installation software provided on CD. (Alternate configurations may require reformatting the drives, and that could take hours in some cases.) The TeraStation proliferates itself as a device on your network as part of the installation. In my case, all seven of my stations saw it and could access it without any additional work on my part.

Should you change your mind about anything -- adding users, modifying access permissions (group and user level access are available) -- you can return to the TeraStation software to initiate those changes or access the unit directly through your browser via its IP address. (This is, essentially, what the software does.) The procedure is password-protected for safety and prompts you with choices in plain English, not IT-ese. As an adjunct to this browser availability, you can also FTP files to and from the drive remotely through its IP address, also using password protection for security. (If you have an AppleTalk network, the TeraStation will talk to it as well.)

If you're already implementing a backup strategy, switching to the Memeo Automatic Backup software provided by Buffalo might not be a high priority but it's worth a look. It has multiple backup options, a single-click restore should your computer crash (or, according to Memeo, should you want to clone your data to a new computer), keeps redundant data if that's what you want it to do and also has a very straightforward user interface. Its simplicity could be a plus for your deployment.

Whether or not the TeraStation is fast is relative. You'll need to make a few assumptions: Four 7200 rpm SATA 3.0Gbit/sec. drives, even bundled in RAID 5, should be fast when guided by a processor and operating system designed specifically to handle the task. So it is fast, inside the box. But that's really irrelevant for a NAS system. The important rating is that which is associated with the access route you're taking to the box.

The TeraStation is 10MB/100MB/1,000MB capable. On a 100Mbit/sec. line, the transfer time for a large (939MB) MPEG 2 file is tolerable. At 54Mbit/sec. over a wireless G connection it works, but it's suitable for a shower and a quick lunch break. As you start moving up the food chain (wireless draft N and then Gigabit networking speeds), life begins to feel good. Overall, with my Linksys Gigabit switch and router, and computers with their own Gigabit LAN ports, the TeraStation is at the top of its class.



A rear view of the TeraStation Pro IIFor added convenience, Buffalo includes two USB 2.0 ports on the back of he unit. They're touted as being able to handle additional attached (USB) hard drives or a USB-based UPS monitoring/power backup system. You can't use the TeraStation as a printer server. It's not wired that way. And don't forget the little one-line LCD screen up front to keep you apprised of the device's status.
This should be an easy sell. The TeraStation is convenient, quick and simple to implement. As for its briefly aforementioned home application, some ad hoc testing proved it can stream video and music files effortlessly -- again, provided your interface is able to handle it.

Pricing shouldn't give you much pause: The 1TB unit I tested here can run you anywhere from $650 to $750 and the price range for the 4TB TeraStation starts at about $2,000. That's comparable to competing products, and Buffalo's "humanized" user interface gives it an edge over some of the IT-centric boxes out there competing for your dollars.