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I think the Mac Pro is almost like a phantom product at this point. Or a riff. Like they're going to say "the new Mac Pro is there is no more Mac Pro". What ca

I think the Mac Pro is almost like a phantom product at this point. Or a riff. Like they're going to say "the new Mac Pro is there is no more Mac Pro". What can they really do, in a single machine, that is more "Pro" than the Studio? How are they going to bring developers along when most aren't developing for twenty-core machines? I still think something else is coming. Maybe something unconventionally stackable. Something for render farms. Whatever it is, it feels like it's going to need novel OS support.

cududa 5y ago
They literally said in the keynote that the new Mac Pro is in the pipeline
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  Right, but the keynote is marketing. And they've been saying that for, what, nearly a decade now? [0] And in that time they have chipped away at that segment from different directions, with the iMac Pro and the Mac Studio. The latter of which is a beast already. What's left? Render farms, scaleable computing. I guess I think there will be some sort of new machine in that segment. But I figure it's not going to be what people expect from a single, unitary Mac Pro desktop. Because once you're up at that level of performance requirement, you start to want modular and scaleable things. What is the pitch for the part of the market that is used to using commodity hardware in scaleable configurations? [0] Edit: I obviously forgot the cheese grater
  - karlshea 5y ago
    > And they've been saying that for, what, nearly a decade now? The latest generation is from 2019?
    - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
      I guess. I mean, it's a forgettable stopgap machine (I forgot it ;-) It's not really what people wanted, is it? It's just something they had to put on sale to shut people up. A conventional, Intel-era thing. They've been saying "something really great is coming", all that. That Mac Pro was not that. Does Apple still care about the market that wants to plug in internal GPU cards? Does that make much sense even in the context of hardware the speed of the Mac Studio? I wonder.
      - karlshea 5y ago
        What? It's a whole new tower with PCIe slots and everything, and was super well received. Were you still under the impression they were selling the trashcan Mac Pro?
        unfocussed_mike 5y ago
        I simply forgot that they made it. I forgot a lot of stuff in 2020 and 2021, like most people. But by extension I certainly don't remember it being "super well received", or I'd probably have remembered it at all. Either way: look at it. It's a tower PC. Do you think the current Apple trajectory has any meaningful room for that? What are people going to really be putting in it except disks?
        karlshea 5y ago
        If all you want is disks then the Mac Studio seems to be exactly what you'd want. I would assume people that want a tower want exactly what you were asking for above, which is GPUs or other cards like audio engineers need. I didn't see a single negative review of the tower at all, so I'm really not sure where that comes from. And they said during the keynote today a new one is coming.
        cpuguy83 5y ago
        "I forgot about it so it must not be great". It's an amazing machine. It's an incredibly expensive machine, but still amazing. > Do you think the current Apple trajectory has any meaningful room for that? Are you upset that you think Apple is going to stop making something that you forgot they made, except there is absolutely 0 evidence that they will stop making it? We know for a fact that they are going to release a new Apple Silicon based Mac Pro. We knew Mac Pro would be the last thing they move over to Apple Silicon. Apple even gave a timeline when they first launched M1, and so far it seems to be on track. Apple has been extremely pragmatic lately, backtracking on objectively bad decisions around everything from keyboards and ports to form factors.
  - yurishimo 5y ago
    They released a new Mac Pro in 2019. I think there is a strong possibility for a revision late this year or next year.
    - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
      OK but to what end? Looking at the Mac Studio... what would an M1-based, drop-in Mac Pro replacement offer on top? That sounds like a tail-end product. It's not like 2022 Apple is the kind of business that announces deep partnerships with graphics card makers. It feels more to me like we're going to see either something that is half-rack-half-Mac, or something with major developments in neural engine hardware, or something. A new segment -- something that is going to need significant new OS work.
      - cududa 5y ago
        CGI, CAD, rendering, driving huge screens, running live sporting events, scientific workloads, massive simultaneous automated app testing, etc. Just because you can’t imagine why someone would need that much compute doesn’t mean the use cases don’t exist.
        unfocussed_mike 5y ago
        I did not say -- at all -- that I can't imagine that kind of power requirement. Not at all. What I said if you read the rest of my comments is that I find it difficult to believe there is a specifically single-desktop-machine use case for that kind of power over and above the Mac Studio. The reason I mention this is that high end (TV and cinema) CGI just is not the domain of single machines anymore; it's the domain of render farms. The people who do that kind of work for TV and cinema now expect to run farms of commodity hardware that can be swapped out and replaced. And that technology is available to everyone in a way that can be constructed more pragmatically. Scientific workloads, similarly: most of that market is not going to spend a bucketload on a single Mac when they can spread their risk with cluster computing. App testing: again, an application for clustering, and low cost hardware spreads risk. So my point, again: given the existence of the iMac Pro line, and the M1 Ultra Mac Studio (with its evident astonishing GPU performance), given that I imagine most Mac Pro users never put an expansion card in their machines (which is the grand theme of Apple -- people don't upgrade or expand, usually), and given that cluster hardware is commonly in use and well-supported, is the niche for single mega-expensive desktops really big enough? I don't think it is -- you think it is. But I think you can disagree with me without imagining me stupid, as I disagree with you without doing the same.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
the_lucifer 5y ago
> What can they really do, in a single machine, that is more "Pro" than the Studio? I'm guessing the Mac Pro will focus more on Upgradability and adding expansion slots? That seems like a direction Apple is willing to go tbh.
- rovr138 5y ago
  I'm just curious how that would look like and what would be compatible. Seems interesting!
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  Why does it need expansion slots? Is that still a thing? :-) Drive bays, yeah. Maybe some approach towards coprocessor boards. But none of this new direction shrieks out "install your own graphics card" anymore.
  - rovr138 5y ago
    Yeah. I'm wondering about network cards for some higher throughput setups.
  - kiratp 5y ago
    This is one of the reasons why - pro audio - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIQINCWMd6I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIQINCWMd6I
    - pvarangot 5y ago
      There's USB-C MADI/DANTE stuff already and it handles a lot of bandwidth with similar latency to those PCIe cards. That guys setup is a niche in the niche.
      - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
        This is just what I mean, yes. A friend told me last night that he thinks there's really a lot of generic resistance to the idea of using thunderbolt in this way, and that is what makes the Mac Pro necessary. Reading more replies I think it's also clear that people still question Apple's GPU claims, and maybe there is more of a market for whatever-PCI-bus GPU cards. Moreover I think if you look at the Mac Studio, it is difficult to imagine Apple thinking that a straightforward M1/M2 cheese grater is a remotely satisfactory product design. But I've been told enough times that I am wrong, (albeit by people who were blown away by a keynote -- am I just old?) that I'm cheerfully willing to admit that I probably will be.
bredren 5y ago
It has been a phantom product, because Apple has needed to fill major gaps in the desktop space first. I suspect Apple is set to debut powerful revision to the Mac Pro focused on AI/ML at WWDC. I wrote about this 10 months back[0], and it still applies following Studio: > It may not be obvious, but Apple has repair work to do in the pro community. Four years ago this month, Apple unusually disclosed that it was "completely rethinking the Mac Pro." [1] > The current Mac Pro design wasn't announced until June of 2019 and didn't hit the market until December 10th of 2019. That's just six months prior to the Apple Silicon announcement. > It seems unlikely Apple spent 2017-2019 designing a Mac Pro that they would not carry forward with Apple Silicon hardware. > The current, Gen 3 2019 Mac Pro design has the Mac Pro Expansion Module (MPX). This is intended to be a plug-and-play system for graphics and storage upgrades. [2] > While the Apple Silicon SoC can run with some GPU tasks, it does seem it does not make sense for the type of work that big discrete cards have generally been deployed for. > There is already a living example of a custom Apple-designed external graphics card. Apple designed and released Afterburner, a custom "accelerator" card targeted at video editing with the gen 3 Mac Pro in 2019. > Afterburner has attributes of the new Apple Silicon design in that it is proprietary to Apple and fanless. [3] > It seems implausible Apple created the Afterburner product for a single release without plans to continue to upgrade and extend the product concept using Apple Silicon. Given "Ultrafusion" it seems plausible that M2 would be able connect multiple custom SoCs that are littered with GPU cores as stackable accelerator cards. > So, I think the question isn't if discrete Apple Silicon GPUs will be supported but how many types and in and what configurations. This prediction not come to pass: > I think the Mac Mini will remain its shape and size, and that alongside internal discrete GPUs for the Pro, Apple may release something akin to the Blackmagic eGPU products they collaborated on for the RX580 and Vega 56. But at least the mid market display now exists. > While possibly not big sellers, Apple Silicon eGPUs would serve generations of new AS notebooks and minis. This creates a whole additional use case. The biggest problem I see with this being a cohesive ecosystem is the lack of a mid-market Apple display. [4] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26956886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26956886 [1] https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives [2] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/06/apple-unveils-powerful-all-new-mac-pro-and-groundbreaking-pro-display-xdr/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/06/apple-unveils-powerfu... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33ywFqY5o1E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33ywFqY5o1E [4] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/wishful-thinking-wwdc-debuts-new-apple-mid-market-display.2235940/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/wishful-thinking-wwdc-d...
valine 5y ago
New die with 64 M1 cores and support for 4TB of ram. Basically fill whatever market the threadripper fills.
Grustaf 5y ago
The pro-ness is probably more about extensibility than speed, as you say 20 cores is already plenty for most. And obviously they are not lying about the Mac Pro, marketing is spin, not saying the opposite of the truth.

cududa 5y ago

They literally said in the keynote that the new Mac Pro is in the pipeline

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
Right, but the keynote is marketing. And they've been saying that for, what, nearly a decade now? [0] And in that time they have chipped away at that segment from different directions, with the iMac Pro and the Mac Studio. The latter of which is a beast already. What's left? Render farms, scaleable computing. I guess I think there will be some sort of new machine in that segment. But I figure it's not going to be what people expect from a single, unitary Mac Pro desktop. Because once you're up at that level of performance requirement, you start to want modular and scaleable things. What is the pitch for the part of the market that is used to using commodity hardware in scaleable configurations? [0] Edit: I obviously forgot the cheese grater
- karlshea 5y ago
  > And they've been saying that for, what, nearly a decade now? The latest generation is from 2019?
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    I guess. I mean, it's a forgettable stopgap machine (I forgot it ;-) It's not really what people wanted, is it? It's just something they had to put on sale to shut people up. A conventional, Intel-era thing. They've been saying "something really great is coming", all that. That Mac Pro was not that. Does Apple still care about the market that wants to plug in internal GPU cards? Does that make much sense even in the context of hardware the speed of the Mac Studio? I wonder.
    - karlshea 5y ago
      What? It's a whole new tower with PCIe slots and everything, and was super well received. Were you still under the impression they were selling the trashcan Mac Pro?
      - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
        I simply forgot that they made it. I forgot a lot of stuff in 2020 and 2021, like most people. But by extension I certainly don't remember it being "super well received", or I'd probably have remembered it at all. Either way: look at it. It's a tower PC. Do you think the current Apple trajectory has any meaningful room for that? What are people going to really be putting in it except disks?
        karlshea 5y ago
        If all you want is disks then the Mac Studio seems to be exactly what you'd want. I would assume people that want a tower want exactly what you were asking for above, which is GPUs or other cards like audio engineers need. I didn't see a single negative review of the tower at all, so I'm really not sure where that comes from. And they said during the keynote today a new one is coming.
        cpuguy83 5y ago
        "I forgot about it so it must not be great". It's an amazing machine. It's an incredibly expensive machine, but still amazing. > Do you think the current Apple trajectory has any meaningful room for that? Are you upset that you think Apple is going to stop making something that you forgot they made, except there is absolutely 0 evidence that they will stop making it? We know for a fact that they are going to release a new Apple Silicon based Mac Pro. We knew Mac Pro would be the last thing they move over to Apple Silicon. Apple even gave a timeline when they first launched M1, and so far it seems to be on track. Apple has been extremely pragmatic lately, backtracking on objectively bad decisions around everything from keyboards and ports to form factors.
- yurishimo 5y ago
  They released a new Mac Pro in 2019. I think there is a strong possibility for a revision late this year or next year.
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    OK but to what end? Looking at the Mac Studio... what would an M1-based, drop-in Mac Pro replacement offer on top? That sounds like a tail-end product. It's not like 2022 Apple is the kind of business that announces deep partnerships with graphics card makers. It feels more to me like we're going to see either something that is half-rack-half-Mac, or something with major developments in neural engine hardware, or something. A new segment -- something that is going to need significant new OS work.
    - cududa 5y ago
      CGI, CAD, rendering, driving huge screens, running live sporting events, scientific workloads, massive simultaneous automated app testing, etc. Just because you can’t imagine why someone would need that much compute doesn’t mean the use cases don’t exist.
      - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
        I did not say -- at all -- that I can't imagine that kind of power requirement. Not at all. What I said if you read the rest of my comments is that I find it difficult to believe there is a specifically single-desktop-machine use case for that kind of power over and above the Mac Studio. The reason I mention this is that high end (TV and cinema) CGI just is not the domain of single machines anymore; it's the domain of render farms. The people who do that kind of work for TV and cinema now expect to run farms of commodity hardware that can be swapped out and replaced. And that technology is available to everyone in a way that can be constructed more pragmatically. Scientific workloads, similarly: most of that market is not going to spend a bucketload on a single Mac when they can spread their risk with cluster computing. App testing: again, an application for clustering, and low cost hardware spreads risk. So my point, again: given the existence of the iMac Pro line, and the M1 Ultra Mac Studio (with its evident astonishing GPU performance), given that I imagine most Mac Pro users never put an expansion card in their machines (which is the grand theme of Apple -- people don't upgrade or expand, usually), and given that cluster hardware is commonly in use and well-supported, is the niche for single mega-expensive desktops really big enough? I don't think it is -- you think it is. But I think you can disagree with me without imagining me stupid, as I disagree with you without doing the same.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

the_lucifer 5y ago

> What can they really do, in a single machine, that is more "Pro" than the Studio? I'm guessing the Mac Pro will focus more on Upgradability and adding expansion slots? That seems like a direction Apple is willing to go tbh.

rovr138 5y ago
I'm just curious how that would look like and what would be compatible. Seems interesting!
unfocussed_mike 5y ago
Why does it need expansion slots? Is that still a thing? :-) Drive bays, yeah. Maybe some approach towards coprocessor boards. But none of this new direction shrieks out "install your own graphics card" anymore.
- rovr138 5y ago
  Yeah. I'm wondering about network cards for some higher throughput setups.
- kiratp 5y ago
  This is one of the reasons why - pro audio - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIQINCWMd6I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIQINCWMd6I
  - pvarangot 5y ago
    There's USB-C MADI/DANTE stuff already and it handles a lot of bandwidth with similar latency to those PCIe cards. That guys setup is a niche in the niche.
    - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
      This is just what I mean, yes. A friend told me last night that he thinks there's really a lot of generic resistance to the idea of using thunderbolt in this way, and that is what makes the Mac Pro necessary. Reading more replies I think it's also clear that people still question Apple's GPU claims, and maybe there is more of a market for whatever-PCI-bus GPU cards. Moreover I think if you look at the Mac Studio, it is difficult to imagine Apple thinking that a straightforward M1/M2 cheese grater is a remotely satisfactory product design. But I've been told enough times that I am wrong, (albeit by people who were blown away by a keynote -- am I just old?) that I'm cheerfully willing to admit that I probably will be.

bredren 5y ago

It has been a phantom product, because Apple has needed to fill major gaps in the desktop space first. I suspect Apple is set to debut powerful revision to the Mac Pro focused on AI/ML at WWDC. I wrote about this 10 months back[0], and it still applies following Studio: > It may not be obvious, but Apple has repair work to do in the pro community. Four years ago this month, Apple unusually disclosed that it was "completely rethinking the Mac Pro." [1] > The current Mac Pro design wasn't announced until June of 2019 and didn't hit the market until December 10th of 2019. That's just six months prior to the Apple Silicon announcement. > It seems unlikely Apple spent 2017-2019 designing a Mac Pro that they would not carry forward with Apple Silicon hardware. > The current, Gen 3 2019 Mac Pro design has the Mac Pro Expansion Module (MPX). This is intended to be a plug-and-play system for graphics and storage upgrades. [2] > While the Apple Silicon SoC can run with some GPU tasks, it does seem it does not make sense for the type of work that big discrete cards have generally been deployed for. > There is already a living example of a custom Apple-designed external graphics card. Apple designed and released Afterburner, a custom "accelerator" card targeted at video editing with the gen 3 Mac Pro in 2019. > Afterburner has attributes of the new Apple Silicon design in that it is proprietary to Apple and fanless. [3] > It seems implausible Apple created the Afterburner product for a single release without plans to continue to upgrade and extend the product concept using Apple Silicon. Given "Ultrafusion" it seems plausible that M2 would be able connect multiple custom SoCs that are littered with GPU cores as stackable accelerator cards. > So, I think the question isn't if discrete Apple Silicon GPUs will be supported but how many types and in and what configurations. This prediction not come to pass: > I think the Mac Mini will remain its shape and size, and that alongside internal discrete GPUs for the Pro, Apple may release something akin to the Blackmagic eGPU products they collaborated on for the RX580 and Vega 56. But at least the mid market display now exists. > While possibly not big sellers, Apple Silicon eGPUs would serve generations of new AS notebooks and minis. This creates a whole additional use case. The biggest problem I see with this being a cohesive ecosystem is the lack of a mid-market Apple display. [4] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26956886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26956886 [1] https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives [2] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/06/apple-unveils-powerful-all-new-mac-pro-and-groundbreaking-pro-display-xdr/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/06/apple-unveils-powerfu... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33ywFqY5o1E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33ywFqY5o1E [4] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/wishful-thinking-wwdc-debuts-new-apple-mid-market-display.2235940/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/wishful-thinking-wwdc-d...

valine 5y ago

New die with 64 M1 cores and support for 4TB of ram. Basically fill whatever market the threadripper fills.

Grustaf 5y ago

The pro-ness is probably more about extensibility than speed, as you say 20 cores is already plenty for most. And obviously they are not lying about the Mac Pro, marketing is spin, not saying the opposite of the truth.