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Apple is struggling to build Mac Pro based on its own silicon

207 points by pulse7 4y ago

xrayarx 4y ago
So the article quotes another article from bloomerg (by Mark Gurman), which can be found here https://archive.ph/pxQam https://archive.ph/pxQam The gist: The new high-end Mac Pro with Apple silicon is behind schedule, and you can blame changes to the company’s chip and manufacturing plans.
- helsinkiandrew 4y ago
  I think this sentence from that article is a big reason why it’s been delayed: > an M2 Extreme version of a Mac Pro would probably cost at least $10,000 — without any other upgrades That would be a very niche market compared with the lower end devices.
  - Hamuko 4y ago
    But the Mac Pro was always for a highly niche market. Even the cheapest Intel-based Mac Pro is $6000. And that's with a pretty meager 8-core CPU that gets worse single-core and multi-core Geekbench scores than the M1 Max found in a $2000 Mac Studio.
    - NeverFade 4y ago
      Fair, but there's still a big difference between the base model currently costing $6,000 and a base model that will cost over $10,000. That's a 70% price hike.
      - Hamuko 4y ago
        It's possible that they're positioning the $4000 Mac Studio as the replacement for the entry-level $6000 Mac Pro, and the $10,000+ Apple Silicon Mac Pro is a replacement for the upmarket SKUs. If the M2 Extreme is to the M2 Ultra what the M1 Ultra is to the M1 Max, namely that it's just two chips pasted together, then the M2 Extreme might start with 128 GB of RAM (Max: 32 GB, Ultra: 64 GB). That alone is a $1000+ upgrade to the current Mac Pro.
      - brookst 4y ago
        That “price hike” depends on how many people buy the base model. If 90% of customers were spending $10k+ anyway, it might make economic sense to just not offer a model at the $6k price point.
    - vbezhenar 4y ago
      It was not always like that. It's the current generation. Old generations had more reasonable pricing.
      - sleepybrett 4y ago
        I feel like the switch was the garbage can pro. I wonder if it's just more of a 'it's not where the market is' thing. Working in tech and creative industries even previous to the garbage can there was a dramatic shift in people just opting into laptops instead of desktops. With only the people with really demanding workflows sticking with the desktops. Now I mostly only see mac desktops in video production contexts (editing stations, compositing/effects, 3d.. maybe you'd also see that in high end audio production as well). As offices have changed over the years with more hot desking etc. it's hard justifying a desktop machine... not to mention the pandemic. So maybe apple made a conscious decision. Keep the mac mini to serve a lower end mostly stationary workforce or for installation type work, kill the whole middle-to-lower-highend desktop line and cater to a high end 'studio' workstation.
      - KennyBlanken 4y ago
        Yup. I asked for an OG intel cheese-grater at an old job. The boss blinked and said something along the lines of "we're not spending that kind of money for your system" and I pointed out that with 16gb of ram but otherwise base config, it was about the same price and a much better deal performance-wise than a Macbook Pro. Xeons versus an intel mobile i5, and the widest/fastest memory bus around at the time? No contest. The water-cooled ones were an absolute shitshow...Apple was pushing the edge too hard on that. AIO coolers are still kinda hit-or-miss (the good, well-made ones are fine.)
      - rconti 4y ago
        Yup. My 2006 Mac Pro (first gen intel mac pro, the original cheese grater tower) cost me under $3000. IIRC, that plus a 24" Dell display added up to $3k total, or $4400 in today's money.
    - wkat4242 4y ago
      > that gets worse single-core and multi-core Geekbench scores than the M1 Max found in a $2000 Mac Studio. That's also because they didn't bother updating it for years. Just like the previous trashcan model. I don't really understand how Apple gets away with that. The people that spend this kind of money to get top of the line hardware are the same ones that are ok buying 4-year-old hardware at introduction price???
      - bluenomatterwho 4y ago
        underpowered and overpriced ;) This irks me a little bit from time to time. But right now we're in a sweet spot where used 2010-2020 Intel hardware can be had for pretty cheap: Apple MacBook Pro 13in Core i5 Retina 2.7GHz (MF840LL/A), 8GB Memory, 256GB Solid State Drive (Renewed) $379.99 I wanted a 90's era Powerbook so bad. The 2015 is a great machine in 2022. Over the years I heard the elders say it: buy used on the cycle if you can't afford the newer gen. It's really true. And I rarely hear someone who buys the expensive loaded kit complain, even 10 years later. This is how they get away with it. I think I must have learned Linux attempting to rescue my Windows systems, haha. Now I want to rant about Darwin...
    - lapcat 4y ago
      In 2012, Apple was still selling an Intel Mac Pro for $2500.
  - yreg 4y ago
    Why though? M2 Extreme would be cheaper for Apple than the current Mac Pro chips it buys from Intel. If Apple believed it has to sell it for 10k for the single reason of avoiding Mac Studio canibalization, and at the same time Apple believed 10k is too high for the customers, then Apple would kill the product.
    - NeverFade 4y ago
      The implication in the article is that M2 Extreme would not be cheaper, but would cost substantially more than these Intel chips. It would also perform far better.
      - yreg 4y ago
        I don't think that implication is clear, but even so I don't understand why Gurman believes that. Apple margins improved with Apple Silicon transition.
        NeverFade 4y ago
        Apple margins may have improved, but the M2 Extreme that Gurman posits would be a beast of a chip and much more expensive to produce: > The company made the decision because of both the complexity and cost of producing a processor that is essentially four M2 Max chips fused together. It also will help Apple and partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. save chip-production resources for higher-volume machines.
        zozbot234 4y ago
        I think the limit would be on the package rather than the chip itself; the Ultra is already two Max dies in a single package. I wonder if this means multiple-socket motherboards (historically used for SMP) are again viable for this class of systems.
        rbanffy 4y ago
        > much more expensive to produce Apple's foothold in video production is a delicate thing and it seems prone to disruption by a player able to offer a macOS comfort with generic x86 prices. edit: removed wrong part
  - gjvc 4y ago
    > an M2 Extreme version of a Mac Pro would probably cost at least $10,000 — without any other upgrades When you're charging $1,000 for a monitor stand, all prices are arbitrary.
    - brookst 4y ago
      Close! Differentiated goods are priced based on what people are willing to pay, not cost of production.
      - gjvc 4y ago
        but how is said monitor stand a "differentiated good" ?!
        dijit 4y ago
        Because it was mostly advertised wrong. The target market for that screen are buying the VESA mount, but Apple didn't include the VESA mount and added it as an add-on, I'm not sure why; meaning the "$600 Monitor stand upgrade" - which is basically to prevent people buying it as a monitor unless they're going for "Luxury" - became $1,000. The Pro Display XDR is competing with $40,000 screens for tv/movie production- and studios that use displays like that swap them out quite often because they lose their calibration; they have rows of VESA mounts.
        gjvc 4y ago
        You've convinced me. $600 for a monitor stand is a complete steal.
        dijit 4y ago
        I think you missed the part where I mentioned that it's not really meant to be a bargain, the bargain is the screen. The "luxury stand" is purely a fashion accessory, because anyone who would actually buy the stand is not buying the screen for it's intended purpose (or at least from the target demographic). It's like buying one of those artic polar watches that can go to 150M that's gold plated. The gold plating is not helping you in that situation, whoever is buying the gold plated edition of that watch is buying it as a fashion accessory, not as an expedition watch. If they want to part with their money: let them.
  - mort96 4y ago
    The Mac Pro is already in the extreme niche. The current Intel-based Mac Pro starts at $6000. That almost-doubling from the already insanely expensive machine could push it past a breaking point for a lot of current customers though, I don't know.
    - rbanffy 4y ago
      > The Mac Pro is already in the extreme niche. The current Intel-based Mac Pro starts at $6000. Oddly enough, the one I played with felt slower than the Mac Studio.
      - dijit 4y ago
        > the one I played with felt slower than the Mac Studio The Mac Studio is faster than the 2019 Mac Pro. https://www.macrumors.com/guide/mac-studio-vs-mac-pro-buyers-guide/ https://www.macrumors.com/guide/mac-studio-vs-mac-pro-buyers... When the Mac Pro came out it was the fastest Mac that existed, but those Intel Chips were already dated and were being roundly beaten by AMD chips of the era. The "killer feature" was the encoding acceleration card, but a faster variant is available inside Apple Silicon. I'm not sure where the cut-off is, but I think the M1 Max (Not ultra) is also faster than the Mac Pro 2019.
        rbanffy 4y ago
        > The "killer feature" was the encoding acceleration card, but a faster variant is available inside Apple Silicon. It still can have 1.5 TB of RAM.
        dijit 4y ago
        I can't think of a workflow that would be better served on a local mac with 1.5TiB of ram, than a linux server somewhere else with that RAM. all the workflows I can conceive of right now would struggle to use more than 128G of RAM, but I am open to ideas.
        4y ago
  - api 4y ago
    ... and it's not like the M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pro or Studio machines are low end. They're blazing fast. It's very much a niche market since anyone demanding even more power can easily just build a Linux box with 2X the power for 1/4 the price or use cloud.
    - jgalt212 4y ago
      Isn't cloud rendering cost prohibitive? i.e. don't you get killed on egress costs?
      - api 4y ago
        For some workloads yes, but as I said you can build an insane local box running Linux or Windows for 1/4 the price of the Mac Pro. Last I checked for a few thousand USD you could have 64 CPU cores with 128 threads, 128 gigs or more of RAM, and one or more top tier GPUs.
    - steve1977 4y ago
      There's use cases (e.g. music production) where this doesn't work.
      - eunoia 4y ago
        Yeah but what music production workflow needs the power of an “extreme” chip? The M1 Max and Pro (not to mention Ultra) are already practically overkill for the vast majority of musical workflows. Many producers work on plain M1 Airs as when everything has enough functional power, the lack of a fan becomes the most desirable feature.
        rewgs 4y ago
        Film composers. Absolutely absurd track counts, plus usually working in quad or 5.1. A majority of the big ones have long since moved to using multiple Windows machines, but most of them did so begrudgingly. For a long time, the usual choice was a Mac Pro, but the Xeons were never a great choice from a processing standpoint -- they just enabled the massive amounts of RAM needed for said absurd track counts, though ECC was an unnecessary added expense. Musicians tend to prefer macOS for a variety of reasons, and the Mac Studio is a breath of fresh air, finally giving us something we actually need. That said, the Mac Studio still doesn't quite enable everything to be loaded on one machine, so the PC farms are still in use; worse, the primary software used to utilize those PC farms, Vienna Ensemble Pro, isn't yet Apple Silicon native, so...for the time being, the Mac Studio still isn't quite ready for prime time. The Apple Silicon Mac Pro would likely enable finally moving to using a single machine running macOS with the CPU performance and amount of RAM needed, so you best believe that film composers will move to it in droves once it comes out, whatever the price, as VEP being native or not will no longer be a factor. Source: was a fairly successful film composer myself until I developed an ear condition called Hyperacusis, now working as a programmer writing custom tools for my peers, and as a tech consultant designing their rigs.
  - Maursault 4y ago
    I don't really accept that. So what if it's $10K? Even if they doubled the price, so what? There are lots of firms that would outfit their studios with dozens of $20K Mac Pros. In 1996/7, the ANS/700, running a special version of AIX, was upwards of $25K. Not many were sold, and yet the ANS group was still profitable. Steve Jobs killed it along with A/UX in his return. This "$10K is too expensive" line doesn't fly. Right now, just upgrading a Mac Pro processor can push the price over $13K. Again, so what? I'm certain there were more than a handful $50K configured 2019 Mac Pros sold. This kind of thing is expensive for the individual, but for a business it's merely a commodity. $50K is cheap because it couldn't even pay the salary of one developer for a year, and the Mac Pro is useful for at least a few years, so cost is more like $16K/yr. That's an absolutely nothing business expense.
    - ryanwaggoner 4y ago
      At Apple's scale, selling tens of thousands of these could both be very profitable and still not worth the effort and distraction.
    - ibejoeb 4y ago
      And it is relatively less than what one would pay for, say, an sgi workstation years ago. Overall, I don't think it's the price that is off-putting for a pro.
    - acchow 4y ago
      > Not many were sold, and yet the ANS group was still profitable. Profitability isn't sufficient for a company like Apple. It has to be the best use of these resources - it needs to be more profitable than dedicating the team to work on something else at Apple.
      - Maursault 4y ago
        I don't think that was it. Jobs wouldn't tolerate any other UNIX at Apple except NeXTSTEP. He killed A/UX while still in negotiations for Apple to purchase NeXT. I don't even think Apple worked on those versions of AIX. IBM likely provided it under contract. ANS only ever ran AIX and NetBSD.
- perfecthjrjth 4y ago
  The talent behind M1 left Apple years ago, because they weren't giving enough stocks, bonuses. So, Apple is left with fixers. I don't expect Apple to bring another revolution in chips.
  - hooo 4y ago
    Do you know where they went or what they're up to now?
    - nexus7556 4y ago
      Some went to Nuvia which was later acquired by Qualcomm. Ian Cutress gave some history in this video: https://youtu.be/zhQ_ytzLUnc https://youtu.be/zhQ_ytzLUnc
      - philjohn 4y ago
        If they can make Qualcomm competitive with the Apple SoC's that would be great for everyone that isn't Apple, and by extension, the market as a whole. Here's hoping.
        ksec 4y ago
        Most people on the Internet, inclusive but not limited to HN over estimated the lead Apple has. The Cortex X3 at TSMC N4 used in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 clocked at 3.26Ghz gets you about ~1500 GB5 Single Core at ~4W. The Apple A16 on the same TSMC N4 clocked at 3.6Ghz gets you about ~1900 GB5 Score using ~5W. The Cortex X3 is much smaller in die size, and only just started optimising specifically for AArach64. Compared to Apple which is on their forth or fifth iteration. I would not be surprised if the Cortex X4 breaks the 1800 barrier using under 5W. Compared to a few years ago Apple SoC vs Snapdragon where single core performance differ by more than 2x. The projected difference between the two will be less than 20%. The more interesting question would be, what happens when Cortex X4 and Cortex X5 reaches these sort of performance, which is good enough to be used in PC and only cost a a few dollars per core in licensing?
bmitc 4y ago
> Mac Pro systems are often used for cinema and video production, and such workloads are getting more demanding as resolutions and color depths increase. And such systems not only need performance, but the also versatility and flexibility of a desktop PC, as they need to install a variety of add-in-cards, accelerators, advanced storage devices, and so on. To add these boards, a new Mac Pro would need advanced I/O, which is somewhat of a departure from Apple's SoC ideology that entails a very high level of integration. I have always wondered: why do these industries effectively bet their industry’s computation on the whims of a company like Apple, who does what they (Apple) want when they (Apple) want and loves to shut out integrations?
- dusted 4y ago
  My impression is that when they look to buy, they get whatever is the best fit for them at that moment.. (maybe biased by various "gifts" and such to the right people) When it's time to upgrade the old stuff, the process happens again, and the previous gear more or less entirely retired..
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
  These industries typically give so few shits when it comes to money that replacing a fleet of 100 2020 Mac Pros with 100 2022 Threadripper based machines is seen as a minor inconvenience at best. Apple provides good hardware at the moment ? Use Apple hardware. Apple can't let us plug in our Quadro cards on our VFX guys machines ? Buy a new workstation somewhere else, who cares ?
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  I think as tech got more standardized, we're seeing industries move away from this (eg. new movies use AWS as a render-farm instead of just buying powerful desktops for the office). Interestingly, there is historic reasons that apple has disproportionately been successful with creatives and its not the marketing of MacBooks to hapless poets. Some of it is just "photoshop was first available on a Mac so other software was first made for a Mac". Early Macs were historically faster and more capable due to using POWER chips, which made them desirable for performance oriented work. It led to a story that Macs were export-banned like weapons due to performance (reality is more fuzzy here) [1]. Other unique advantages Macs supposedly have: the first color monitor (def better for creative work). Additionally, apple (Steve Jobs?) cared about graphics and color more than competitors, so any creative would want to use a system that cared about what they cared about. Even today, apple advertises their very expensive "reference grade" monitors. I'm not a creative, so I don't know how truly the apple monitor fills that purpose. The aesthetic and big $5k monitor (which works best with a Mac) was claimed to replace a $30k small and ugly reference monitor, which would leave lots of budget to splurge on a Mac Pro. --- [1] https://www.techjunkie.com/apples-1999-power-mac-g4-really-classified-weapon/ https://www.techjunkie.com/apples-1999-power-mac-g4-really-c...
schappim 4y ago
The amount of advertising on that site is bonkers, even covering the text!
- catfishx 4y ago
  Also the intercepting of the back button should be forbidden
  - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
    Turn off javascript then it is impossible, barring a shitty redirect.
  - Tepix 4y ago
    Yes i hate that Microsoft does it, too
- jmkni 4y ago
  I didn't even notice until I read this comment, uBlock Origin (on Firefox) does a really good job of getting rid of the ads.
  - bartvk 4y ago
    Same here. I didn't notice anything. I just read the article without being bothered about anything whatsoever.
- kome 4y ago
  Please use Firefox with ublock origin, for a better web.
  - sbuk 4y ago
    1Blocker on Safari does the same...
  - 72deluxe 4y ago
    Or even better LibreWolf for a better web without tonnes of Mozilla telemetry!
reacharavindh 4y ago
I know the article mentions operational stuff like moving production to a different country and such, but I can’t help but wonder if it has anything to do with all the engineers that moved on from Apple to found startups and other companies that wanted a piece of the magic that Apple pulled with the M series chips.. Curious if any HNers in the know could spill such info with a throwaway
- hocuspocus 4y ago
  Maybe it's a gross oversimplification but I thought that while the next iterations of the A and smaller M SoCs were designed in California, the bigger M chips are developed in Israel where the team is much younger.
  - nkristoffersen 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure its Austin Texas https://eu.statesman.com/story/news/2012/09/01/apple-buys-austin-based-chip-designer-intrinsity/9813952007/ https://eu.statesman.com/story/news/2012/09/01/apple-buys-au...
- matwood 4y ago
  I think the brain drain story was way overblown. People are always coming and going on any team. Given how long hardware takes to design and plan, covid lockdowns are more likely to have impacted processors that should be coming out now.
_s 4y ago
Side question with the product and processor names; any one else finding Apple's product naming getting ... complicated? Can't we just have the product names based on size, and a moniker dictate its features + processor? Maybe something like; - Mac, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, Watch And you can get them in: - Mini, Max or just "normal size" With your choice of: - M?, M? Pro, M? Ultra Running - MacOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS We've already got a "mini" iPhone (SE), MacBook (Air), Mac. Plus the normal sized ones; 14" for the laptops and studio for the Mac, and then max being 16" laptops, or a tower mac, and the 12.9" tablet etc. Same for the watch too, and the iMac has played around the 21/24/27 sizes already. Perhaps I just don't understand the product differential requirements from branding / marketing perspectives.
- mort96 4y ago
  You're forgetting the M? Max monicker. I would love to run an M1 Max Mac Max.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  The closest thing to a MacBook mini would actually be the 12-inch fanless MacBook that was always highly constrained by thermals on the Intel platform. It would be a lot more interesting on Apple Silicon, perhaps for the school education market that seems to mostly use Chromebooks these days.
  - davnicwil 4y ago
    it continues to baffle me that they haven't yet reintroduced this model. It was always an assumption of mine, perhaps incorrectly, that that model was a design/engineering experiment that was just the wrong side of the line on practicality but served as a market test for that form factor. Anecdotally it seemed very popular, and loved by the people who bought one. Perhaps the numbers said otherwise, because otherwise I have no idea why they didn't reintroduce it as an M1/M2 machine. Perhaps, and this is maybe just being hopeful, they're waiting for the even better efficiency of the M3 etc before reintroducing it because they want to do it, but absolutely nail it when they do without any battery life compromise. After all, they already ran the market demand test, so this would make sense if so. If that turns out to be the case I'll almost certainly buy one.
dblooman 4y ago
For those people who use a high workstation, what is the typical price? I feel like people spending more than 10k on a machine must not be bothered, they want the performance
- rekoil 4y ago
  $10k is easily double what a beast workstation has traditionally cost. Yes, you've been able to configure Mac Pros or iMac Pros for similar prices in the past, but it's always been the ultra high-end with niche use cases, currently if you max out a Mac Studio you're up to around $10k. That's with 20x general compute cores, 32x neural engines, and 64x GPU cores, 128GB RAM, and 8TB of storage. I guess it's probably useful for 8K video workloads, but not much else. If the article is right and they're targeting a $10k base price for the Extreme version of the chip, then they better get it VERY right for it to be worth the effort, and I wouldn't expect many customers to be lining up regardless.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
    > $10k is easily double what a beast workstation has traditionally cost I was thinking similarly. Not Mac, but $4-5k will get you an extremely well specced Dell/HP workstation suitable for nearly anything. Staying under $5k can also make it easier to push it through finance where higher price premiums typically require more paperwork.
    - kergonath 4y ago
      Here (research lab doing computational materials science), we get a €8k workstation every three years or so. AFAIK there is no review from the accounting people below €15k. In any case, honestly, the expense is tiny compared to the salary and other costs of whoever is using it for 3 years (close to a quarter million overall).
      - 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
        > …the expense is tiny compared to the salary and other costs of whoever is using it for 3 years No argument there, but a line is drawn somewhere on ease of purchasing and it usually falls short of $10k.
jeffybefffy519 4y ago
It sounds like the killed off their own top tier Mac by being too performant in lower tiers.
- pulse7 4y ago
  It is "too performant" because it is integrated. But because "it is integrated" it can not be easily expanded with other needed "performant gear"...
efields 4y ago
Better to figure out long term production plans, i.e. “we need to get out of china bc the US/china relationship is deteriorating”, before committing to production. This is fine.
andix 4y ago
If they care for pro users (to keep the platform macOS alive), they need to develop it even if it’s a loss. If they lose most of their pro users, a lot of regular users may follow.
- ryanwaggoner 4y ago
  Eh, I disagree. The Mac Pro market is a tiny niche. I’ve been doing iOS and macOS development for more than a decade and I’ve never met someone with a Mac Pro, so I’m pretty skeptical of the idea that the macOS platform is in any way dependent on a tiny fraction of (mostly corporate) users being able to use macOS for their 8k video editing workflows or whatever.
  - matwood 4y ago
    Similar. The last MacPro I saw was a friends PowerPC cheese grater MP over a decade ago. Laptops were taking off with Intel's Core architecture, and I haven't seen an MP since.
gumby 4y ago
If they really cared about this niche market I think they would need to rethink the problem. A lot of the important rendering is done in rendering farms (AKA cloud these days). So build a two part design: a rack form factor with a storage fabric and a lot of processors combined with a super mac studio for display and control, all connected with 10 GB. The investment would be immense compared to the market (not just in hardware but with the end user tools) and hard for most companies to develop software for. The only upside for Apple with this approach would be that their cloud back end could benefit from this development. It's the classic Innovator's Dilemma: I don't see this market being worth investing in at all for a company like Apple.
- ChildOfChaos 4y ago
  They don't have much of a cloud back end at the moment though do they? Thought they used Google.
  - rmorey 4y ago
    Apple runs their own DC’s for some things, but is also primarily an Azure customer, IIRC
- scarface74 4y ago
  You overestimate how much work is actually done in the cloud. While I can’t speak definitely how much rendering is done in the cloud, I can speak to how much general IT spend is done in the cloud from someone who should know… https://accelerationeconomy.com/cloud/amazon-shocker-ceo-jassy-says-cloud-less-than-5-of-all-it-spending/ https://accelerationeconomy.com/cloud/amazon-shocker-ceo-jas... Disclaimer:Jassy is my skip*7 manager
  - gumby 4y ago
    Not an external cloud, but those pixar movies are generated by big server farms. The cloud just resides in pixar's buildings, not amazon's. And that's the point of the cloud metaphor (starting from the original Internet protocols paper from Cerf et al): you don't care. It doesn't mean "a computer somebody else owns"
exabrial 4y ago
Anyone that has hooked up a external drive to an M1 or M2 based notebook knows why: the performance of external devices dropped off a cliff with Apple’s own silicon. Not to mention single external support… Consumers Pro users are likely to look aside on the external IO issues, but it’s doubtful that actual studios would.
- sephamorr 4y ago
  Can you tell me more about this? Are you unable to hit line rates, or are you just commenting about lackluster io options? I'm looking to add some M.2 storage via thunderbolt enclosure to my machine and would otherwise be expecting to be able to saturate the pcie lanes.
  - exabrial 4y ago
    This regression I've personally tested and confirm: You can't hit anywhere near "line rate" with usb 3.1/3.2, though an Intel Mac will gladly do so with the same _exact_ drive. You will experience write stalls and other performance problems. I don't have a usb4 drive to test by I wouldn't hold your breath. I do not have a Thunderbolt 3 device to test. Google tells me it's a problem: https://9to5mac.com/2022/04/18/m1-mac-thunderbolt-4-ports-speed-tests/ https://9to5mac.com/2022/04/18/m1-mac-thunderbolt-4-ports-sp... Expect _at most_half the advertised speeds and feel lucky if you achieve them. EDIT: From the article I linked: I just noticed they suggest try connecting my drive to a Thunderbolt 3 dock first. LOL, ok, I'll give this a try.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > Anyone that has hooked up a external drive to an M1 or M2 based notebook knows why: the performance of external devices dropped off a cliff with Apple’s own silicon. This is false in my experience. I bought a Thunderbolt 3 to Dual NVMe M.2 SSD enclosure (Sabrent EC-T3DN), set up the SSDs in a RAID 0 array, and Blackmagic Disk Speed Test benchmarked that configuration at 2,500 MB/sec read and write. That's very close to the maximum real-world usable bandwidth for TB3¹. ¹ https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2019/20190128_1352-understanding-Thunderbolt3-bandwidth.html https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2019/20190128_1352-unde...
jupp0r 4y ago
Are Mac Pros even a viable platform for professional users given the infrequency of upgrades of the platform? Intel Xeon W-3275M is more than 3 years old at this point. Can people with demand for so much compute even afford to not get modern hardware?
mark_l_watson 4y ago
I am skeptical that “power users” need more than a Mac Studio with possibly some of the feature upgrades. While having power on the desktop is great, for real compute use cloud resources.
- ARandumGuy 4y ago
  A lot of Mac Pro users are involved in high end media production. For those users, the power is beneficial so that you never have to wait for your computer. For a more specific example, music producers liked the fact you could have over a terabyte of RAM on the Mac Pro. This allows keeping their entire library of VST plugins loaded into memory, meaning they never have to wait to load plugins into their project.
- htag 4y ago
  A very fast internet connection would be 4gbps symmetrical. A modern NVME can read ~5gbps. DDR5 supports up to 51GBs. PCIE6 has a symmetrical 128GBs connection. If file size is a bottleneck for you then you'll see better performance computing locally, especially if you can cache workloads in DDR5 before saving to the filesystem.
  - mark_l_watson 4y ago
    True enough. My Dad, who is 101 and does video editing and animation as a hobby, seems to suffer from long rendering and other processing bottlenecks. I have mentioned using cloud resources, and he doesn' want the hassle. He does buy whatever best Pro box Apple has about every 3 years.
jscipione 4y ago
If Apple really cared about their pro users they would have launched an Intel Mac Pro update to fill the gap but they didn’t because they don’t. Pros were ready to jump ship after the disastrous iMac Pro was launched in April of 2017 which is why Apple held a round table discussion with members of the press in April 2017 to allay those fears by promising that a new modular Mac Pro was coming. Two years later in December 2019 Apple fulfilled their promise by releasing the Mac Pro. But between 2017 and 2019 Nvidia made serious gains over the competition which left the Mac Pro obsolete on launch. Fast forward 3 years later to today and the pro market has really started to abandon Apple in favor of machines running Nvidia GPUs. Apple is attempting to create an updated Mac Pro that will bring those pros back to the platform and to do that they have to compete with Nvidia and to do that they have to ramp up the GPU core count significantly which has been difficult delaying the product further.
spicymaki 4y ago
The semiconductor business is not easy. The M-series chip makes sense because you can share it between mobile and desktop machines. The A-series and the M-series are very closely related. Once you start to enter the high-end server market you have to add more IP, change the processor interconnect, topology, and increase the transistor count on the IP you already developed. This leads to the necessity to design another line of processors which needs additional design, verification, validation, software development, etc that you won't be able to share with your profitable chips. You then need to ask, is there really a market for this? When Apple used 3rd party CPUs they outsourced the cost of that server development work, the 3rd party Intel already had a large market for their Xeon class chips so development costs were spread across customers. The business made sense. Let's face it, the Pro side of the business is tiny relative to the mobile market and it does not make business sense.
- anikom15 4y ago
  My naïve solution to this would be to build a multi-CPU system instead of making a higher performance CPU.
  - sroussey 4y ago
    It would be cool if Apple’s Pro machine used an expandable “blade” design, so you could have 4x Ultra/Extreme in a NUMA arch. SOC with soldered memory, yet still expandable. https://twitter.com/sroussey/status/1512934509540360195?s=20 https://twitter.com/sroussey/status/1512934509540360195?s=20
GeekyBear 4y ago
I imagine that it has a lot to do with TSMC's 3nm being pushed back so far. History shows that a very large chip made on a process node that has just come online isn't going to have a good initial yield, and 3nm wafers are said to be fairly expensive. >One wafer processed on TSMC's leading edge N3 manufacturing technology will cost over $20,000 according to DigiTimes https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-will-charge-20000-per-3nm-wafer https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-will-charge-20000-per...
concinds 4y ago
What I don't get, is that Apple lost their foothold in both the creative market & education markets, and don't seem to be trying to address it. Why is the Mac Pro still the same price, three years after its release? Why not work with aeronautics, engineering, CAD, architecture vendors to port their apps to the Mac? Why not sacrifice hardware margins, now that they're moving into services? I read an estimate from a French firm that Mac Pro volumes are orders of magnitude lower than Power Mac volumes were two decades ago; are they doing anything about it?
- tibbon 4y ago
  One thing to note is that you used to need a Power Mac for lots of tasks. Now it’s just a nice bonus over your MBP and harder to justify
  - concinds 4y ago
    True, a lot of this moved to laptops for Innovator's Dilemma-reasons, but surely they have a plan to secure a more few niches, beyond FAANG software developers for the Mac, and students for the iPhone and Watch? The iPad was intended to dominate "what comes after PCs", but PCs never went away; and it just seems like Apple never course-corrected from that vision. That's what I'd like to see: a coherent vision for the future of computing. We haven't seen that since the failed post-PC thing in 2010.
  - strict9 4y ago
    True. I remember a video editing class in college and we had to use the cheese grater Mac Pro render our work. I don't remember all the details but I know I didn't want to try it at home on my white MacBook. The gap between laptop and desktop with today's M1 MBPs is much more narrow for sure.
- _moof 4y ago
  There is an unbelievable amount and diversity of software used in aerospace that is Windows only, from general mechanical engineering tools to highly specialized data acquisition and analysis packages, microcontroller interfaces, optics design, you name it. Getting all that to move over to a new platform would be an enormous undertaking for essentially no benefit on the part of the vendors. I suppose you could do it piecemeal if you really wanted to, but it's still an uphill battle in an industry where Windows is pretty solidly entrenched.
jjtheblunt 4y ago
How is the Mac Studio, which is itself a beast even in base configuration, not "pro"? I also wonder, does the SEC track trades placed by Mark Gurman and those who republish (collectively a bandwagon of such) pronouncements of analysts?
- modeless 4y ago
  The only thing pro about it is single threaded performance, and even there it's not close to the best available, as Zen 4 and Raptor Lake surpass it. In other areas it's lacking. A Threadripper will destroy it in multithreaded performance with 64 cores and terabytes of RAM. A 4090 will blow it away in GPU performance.
  - jjtheblunt 4y ago
    I possibly misunderstand, but are you suggesting there's an NVidia 4090 on die with the Raptor Lake or Threadripper in some variant of either?
    - wolftickets 4y ago
      I think they mean including a 4090 in a build with either CPU choice would produce a more performant computer.
      - modeless 4y ago
        Yes. And cheaper. I just ordered a Raptor Lake + 4090 configuration from a major PC builder for $3500, which is cheaper than the M1 Ultra Mac Studio.
        jjtheblunt 4y ago
        What will you run on it that can take advantage of a just released pair of processors? Sounds awesome; thanks for clarifying above, too.
lastdong 4y ago
Many houses dropped apple, not only because of price, but also OS capabilities and software availability. The system became too limited, so where you would see rows of mac pros, you prob now see PCs.
- sigmoid10 4y ago
  I love my M1 Air, but I never understood why these high-tier workstation places put up with Apple in the first place.
BooneJS 4y ago
I presume dropping a few cores and replacing with PCIe lanes is what’s on tap. But man, the volume for that chip will be the smallest of any silicon, and the yield won’t be great.
sanguy 4y ago
Pretty happy with my loaded up Studio performance wise which has replaced Mac Pro's I've had for the past 3 generations. Thunderbolt changes the upgradability by just plugging stuff in as needed. Only RAM is a concern this way.
Avlin67 4y ago
next gen x86 WS will rip off any m2 chips whether it is intel or amd. with DDR5 8/12 channels and 128 pcie gen 5 lanes the m2 chips can not compete…

207 points by pulse7 4y ago

So the article quotes another article from bloomerg (by Mark Gurman), which can be found here https://archive.ph/pxQam https://archive.ph/pxQam The gist: The new high-end Mac Pro with Apple silicon is behind schedule, and you can blame changes to the company’s chip and manufacturing plans.

helsinkiandrew 4y ago
I think this sentence from that article is a big reason why it’s been delayed: > an M2 Extreme version of a Mac Pro would probably cost at least $10,000 — without any other upgrades That would be a very niche market compared with the lower end devices.
- Hamuko 4y ago
  But the Mac Pro was always for a highly niche market. Even the cheapest Intel-based Mac Pro is $6000. And that's with a pretty meager 8-core CPU that gets worse single-core and multi-core Geekbench scores than the M1 Max found in a $2000 Mac Studio.
  - NeverFade 4y ago
    Fair, but there's still a big difference between the base model currently costing $6,000 and a base model that will cost over $10,000. That's a 70% price hike.
    - Hamuko 4y ago
      It's possible that they're positioning the $4000 Mac Studio as the replacement for the entry-level $6000 Mac Pro, and the $10,000+ Apple Silicon Mac Pro is a replacement for the upmarket SKUs. If the M2 Extreme is to the M2 Ultra what the M1 Ultra is to the M1 Max, namely that it's just two chips pasted together, then the M2 Extreme might start with 128 GB of RAM (Max: 32 GB, Ultra: 64 GB). That alone is a $1000+ upgrade to the current Mac Pro.
    - brookst 4y ago
      That “price hike” depends on how many people buy the base model. If 90% of customers were spending $10k+ anyway, it might make economic sense to just not offer a model at the $6k price point.
  - vbezhenar 4y ago
    It was not always like that. It's the current generation. Old generations had more reasonable pricing.
    - sleepybrett 4y ago
      I feel like the switch was the garbage can pro. I wonder if it's just more of a 'it's not where the market is' thing. Working in tech and creative industries even previous to the garbage can there was a dramatic shift in people just opting into laptops instead of desktops. With only the people with really demanding workflows sticking with the desktops. Now I mostly only see mac desktops in video production contexts (editing stations, compositing/effects, 3d.. maybe you'd also see that in high end audio production as well). As offices have changed over the years with more hot desking etc. it's hard justifying a desktop machine... not to mention the pandemic. So maybe apple made a conscious decision. Keep the mac mini to serve a lower end mostly stationary workforce or for installation type work, kill the whole middle-to-lower-highend desktop line and cater to a high end 'studio' workstation.
    - KennyBlanken 4y ago
      Yup. I asked for an OG intel cheese-grater at an old job. The boss blinked and said something along the lines of "we're not spending that kind of money for your system" and I pointed out that with 16gb of ram but otherwise base config, it was about the same price and a much better deal performance-wise than a Macbook Pro. Xeons versus an intel mobile i5, and the widest/fastest memory bus around at the time? No contest. The water-cooled ones were an absolute shitshow...Apple was pushing the edge too hard on that. AIO coolers are still kinda hit-or-miss (the good, well-made ones are fine.)
    - rconti 4y ago
      Yup. My 2006 Mac Pro (first gen intel mac pro, the original cheese grater tower) cost me under $3000. IIRC, that plus a 24" Dell display added up to $3k total, or $4400 in today's money.
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    > that gets worse single-core and multi-core Geekbench scores than the M1 Max found in a $2000 Mac Studio. That's also because they didn't bother updating it for years. Just like the previous trashcan model. I don't really understand how Apple gets away with that. The people that spend this kind of money to get top of the line hardware are the same ones that are ok buying 4-year-old hardware at introduction price???
    - bluenomatterwho 4y ago
      underpowered and overpriced ;) This irks me a little bit from time to time. But right now we're in a sweet spot where used 2010-2020 Intel hardware can be had for pretty cheap: Apple MacBook Pro 13in Core i5 Retina 2.7GHz (MF840LL/A), 8GB Memory, 256GB Solid State Drive (Renewed) $379.99 I wanted a 90's era Powerbook so bad. The 2015 is a great machine in 2022. Over the years I heard the elders say it: buy used on the cycle if you can't afford the newer gen. It's really true. And I rarely hear someone who buys the expensive loaded kit complain, even 10 years later. This is how they get away with it. I think I must have learned Linux attempting to rescue my Windows systems, haha. Now I want to rant about Darwin...
  - lapcat 4y ago
    In 2012, Apple was still selling an Intel Mac Pro for $2500.
- yreg 4y ago
  Why though? M2 Extreme would be cheaper for Apple than the current Mac Pro chips it buys from Intel. If Apple believed it has to sell it for 10k for the single reason of avoiding Mac Studio canibalization, and at the same time Apple believed 10k is too high for the customers, then Apple would kill the product.
  - NeverFade 4y ago
    The implication in the article is that M2 Extreme would not be cheaper, but would cost substantially more than these Intel chips. It would also perform far better.
    - yreg 4y ago
      I don't think that implication is clear, but even so I don't understand why Gurman believes that. Apple margins improved with Apple Silicon transition.
      - NeverFade 4y ago
        Apple margins may have improved, but the M2 Extreme that Gurman posits would be a beast of a chip and much more expensive to produce: > The company made the decision because of both the complexity and cost of producing a processor that is essentially four M2 Max chips fused together. It also will help Apple and partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. save chip-production resources for higher-volume machines.
        zozbot234 4y ago
        I think the limit would be on the package rather than the chip itself; the Ultra is already two Max dies in a single package. I wonder if this means multiple-socket motherboards (historically used for SMP) are again viable for this class of systems.
        rbanffy 4y ago
        > much more expensive to produce Apple's foothold in video production is a delicate thing and it seems prone to disruption by a player able to offer a macOS comfort with generic x86 prices. edit: removed wrong part
- gjvc 4y ago
  > an M2 Extreme version of a Mac Pro would probably cost at least $10,000 — without any other upgrades When you're charging $1,000 for a monitor stand, all prices are arbitrary.
  - brookst 4y ago
    Close! Differentiated goods are priced based on what people are willing to pay, not cost of production.
    - gjvc 4y ago
      but how is said monitor stand a "differentiated good" ?!
      - dijit 4y ago
        Because it was mostly advertised wrong. The target market for that screen are buying the VESA mount, but Apple didn't include the VESA mount and added it as an add-on, I'm not sure why; meaning the "$600 Monitor stand upgrade" - which is basically to prevent people buying it as a monitor unless they're going for "Luxury" - became $1,000. The Pro Display XDR is competing with $40,000 screens for tv/movie production- and studios that use displays like that swap them out quite often because they lose their calibration; they have rows of VESA mounts.
        gjvc 4y ago
        You've convinced me. $600 for a monitor stand is a complete steal.
        dijit 4y ago
        I think you missed the part where I mentioned that it's not really meant to be a bargain, the bargain is the screen. The "luxury stand" is purely a fashion accessory, because anyone who would actually buy the stand is not buying the screen for it's intended purpose (or at least from the target demographic). It's like buying one of those artic polar watches that can go to 150M that's gold plated. The gold plating is not helping you in that situation, whoever is buying the gold plated edition of that watch is buying it as a fashion accessory, not as an expedition watch. If they want to part with their money: let them.
- mort96 4y ago
  The Mac Pro is already in the extreme niche. The current Intel-based Mac Pro starts at $6000. That almost-doubling from the already insanely expensive machine could push it past a breaking point for a lot of current customers though, I don't know.
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    > The Mac Pro is already in the extreme niche. The current Intel-based Mac Pro starts at $6000. Oddly enough, the one I played with felt slower than the Mac Studio.
    - dijit 4y ago
      > the one I played with felt slower than the Mac Studio The Mac Studio is faster than the 2019 Mac Pro. https://www.macrumors.com/guide/mac-studio-vs-mac-pro-buyers-guide/ https://www.macrumors.com/guide/mac-studio-vs-mac-pro-buyers... When the Mac Pro came out it was the fastest Mac that existed, but those Intel Chips were already dated and were being roundly beaten by AMD chips of the era. The "killer feature" was the encoding acceleration card, but a faster variant is available inside Apple Silicon. I'm not sure where the cut-off is, but I think the M1 Max (Not ultra) is also faster than the Mac Pro 2019.
      - rbanffy 4y ago
        > The "killer feature" was the encoding acceleration card, but a faster variant is available inside Apple Silicon. It still can have 1.5 TB of RAM.
        dijit 4y ago
        I can't think of a workflow that would be better served on a local mac with 1.5TiB of ram, than a linux server somewhere else with that RAM. all the workflows I can conceive of right now would struggle to use more than 128G of RAM, but I am open to ideas.
        4y ago
- api 4y ago
  ... and it's not like the M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pro or Studio machines are low end. They're blazing fast. It's very much a niche market since anyone demanding even more power can easily just build a Linux box with 2X the power for 1/4 the price or use cloud.
  - jgalt212 4y ago
    Isn't cloud rendering cost prohibitive? i.e. don't you get killed on egress costs?
    - api 4y ago
      For some workloads yes, but as I said you can build an insane local box running Linux or Windows for 1/4 the price of the Mac Pro. Last I checked for a few thousand USD you could have 64 CPU cores with 128 threads, 128 gigs or more of RAM, and one or more top tier GPUs.
  - steve1977 4y ago
    There's use cases (e.g. music production) where this doesn't work.
    - eunoia 4y ago
      Yeah but what music production workflow needs the power of an “extreme” chip? The M1 Max and Pro (not to mention Ultra) are already practically overkill for the vast majority of musical workflows. Many producers work on plain M1 Airs as when everything has enough functional power, the lack of a fan becomes the most desirable feature.
      - rewgs 4y ago
        Film composers. Absolutely absurd track counts, plus usually working in quad or 5.1. A majority of the big ones have long since moved to using multiple Windows machines, but most of them did so begrudgingly. For a long time, the usual choice was a Mac Pro, but the Xeons were never a great choice from a processing standpoint -- they just enabled the massive amounts of RAM needed for said absurd track counts, though ECC was an unnecessary added expense. Musicians tend to prefer macOS for a variety of reasons, and the Mac Studio is a breath of fresh air, finally giving us something we actually need. That said, the Mac Studio still doesn't quite enable everything to be loaded on one machine, so the PC farms are still in use; worse, the primary software used to utilize those PC farms, Vienna Ensemble Pro, isn't yet Apple Silicon native, so...for the time being, the Mac Studio still isn't quite ready for prime time. The Apple Silicon Mac Pro would likely enable finally moving to using a single machine running macOS with the CPU performance and amount of RAM needed, so you best believe that film composers will move to it in droves once it comes out, whatever the price, as VEP being native or not will no longer be a factor. Source: was a fairly successful film composer myself until I developed an ear condition called Hyperacusis, now working as a programmer writing custom tools for my peers, and as a tech consultant designing their rigs.
- Maursault 4y ago
  I don't really accept that. So what if it's $10K? Even if they doubled the price, so what? There are lots of firms that would outfit their studios with dozens of $20K Mac Pros. In 1996/7, the ANS/700, running a special version of AIX, was upwards of $25K. Not many were sold, and yet the ANS group was still profitable. Steve Jobs killed it along with A/UX in his return. This "$10K is too expensive" line doesn't fly. Right now, just upgrading a Mac Pro processor can push the price over $13K. Again, so what? I'm certain there were more than a handful $50K configured 2019 Mac Pros sold. This kind of thing is expensive for the individual, but for a business it's merely a commodity. $50K is cheap because it couldn't even pay the salary of one developer for a year, and the Mac Pro is useful for at least a few years, so cost is more like $16K/yr. That's an absolutely nothing business expense.
  - ryanwaggoner 4y ago
    At Apple's scale, selling tens of thousands of these could both be very profitable and still not worth the effort and distraction.
  - ibejoeb 4y ago
    And it is relatively less than what one would pay for, say, an sgi workstation years ago. Overall, I don't think it's the price that is off-putting for a pro.
  - acchow 4y ago
    > Not many were sold, and yet the ANS group was still profitable. Profitability isn't sufficient for a company like Apple. It has to be the best use of these resources - it needs to be more profitable than dedicating the team to work on something else at Apple.
    - Maursault 4y ago
      I don't think that was it. Jobs wouldn't tolerate any other UNIX at Apple except NeXTSTEP. He killed A/UX while still in negotiations for Apple to purchase NeXT. I don't even think Apple worked on those versions of AIX. IBM likely provided it under contract. ANS only ever ran AIX and NetBSD.
perfecthjrjth 4y ago
The talent behind M1 left Apple years ago, because they weren't giving enough stocks, bonuses. So, Apple is left with fixers. I don't expect Apple to bring another revolution in chips.
- hooo 4y ago
  Do you know where they went or what they're up to now?
  - nexus7556 4y ago
    Some went to Nuvia which was later acquired by Qualcomm. Ian Cutress gave some history in this video: https://youtu.be/zhQ_ytzLUnc https://youtu.be/zhQ_ytzLUnc
    - philjohn 4y ago
      If they can make Qualcomm competitive with the Apple SoC's that would be great for everyone that isn't Apple, and by extension, the market as a whole. Here's hoping.
      - ksec 4y ago
        Most people on the Internet, inclusive but not limited to HN over estimated the lead Apple has. The Cortex X3 at TSMC N4 used in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 clocked at 3.26Ghz gets you about ~1500 GB5 Single Core at ~4W. The Apple A16 on the same TSMC N4 clocked at 3.6Ghz gets you about ~1900 GB5 Score using ~5W. The Cortex X3 is much smaller in die size, and only just started optimising specifically for AArach64. Compared to Apple which is on their forth or fifth iteration. I would not be surprised if the Cortex X4 breaks the 1800 barrier using under 5W. Compared to a few years ago Apple SoC vs Snapdragon where single core performance differ by more than 2x. The projected difference between the two will be less than 20%. The more interesting question would be, what happens when Cortex X4 and Cortex X5 reaches these sort of performance, which is good enough to be used in PC and only cost a a few dollars per core in licensing?

bmitc 4y ago

> Mac Pro systems are often used for cinema and video production, and such workloads are getting more demanding as resolutions and color depths increase. And such systems not only need performance, but the also versatility and flexibility of a desktop PC, as they need to install a variety of add-in-cards, accelerators, advanced storage devices, and so on. To add these boards, a new Mac Pro would need advanced I/O, which is somewhat of a departure from Apple's SoC ideology that entails a very high level of integration. I have always wondered: why do these industries effectively bet their industry’s computation on the whims of a company like Apple, who does what they (Apple) want when they (Apple) want and loves to shut out integrations?

dusted 4y ago
My impression is that when they look to buy, they get whatever is the best fit for them at that moment.. (maybe biased by various "gifts" and such to the right people) When it's time to upgrade the old stuff, the process happens again, and the previous gear more or less entirely retired..
ohgodplsno 4y ago
These industries typically give so few shits when it comes to money that replacing a fleet of 100 2020 Mac Pros with 100 2022 Threadripper based machines is seen as a minor inconvenience at best. Apple provides good hardware at the moment ? Use Apple hardware. Apple can't let us plug in our Quadro cards on our VFX guys machines ? Buy a new workstation somewhere else, who cares ?
vineyardmike 4y ago
I think as tech got more standardized, we're seeing industries move away from this (eg. new movies use AWS as a render-farm instead of just buying powerful desktops for the office). Interestingly, there is historic reasons that apple has disproportionately been successful with creatives and its not the marketing of MacBooks to hapless poets. Some of it is just "photoshop was first available on a Mac so other software was first made for a Mac". Early Macs were historically faster and more capable due to using POWER chips, which made them desirable for performance oriented work. It led to a story that Macs were export-banned like weapons due to performance (reality is more fuzzy here) [1]. Other unique advantages Macs supposedly have: the first color monitor (def better for creative work). Additionally, apple (Steve Jobs?) cared about graphics and color more than competitors, so any creative would want to use a system that cared about what they cared about. Even today, apple advertises their very expensive "reference grade" monitors. I'm not a creative, so I don't know how truly the apple monitor fills that purpose. The aesthetic and big $5k monitor (which works best with a Mac) was claimed to replace a $30k small and ugly reference monitor, which would leave lots of budget to splurge on a Mac Pro. --- [1] https://www.techjunkie.com/apples-1999-power-mac-g4-really-classified-weapon/ https://www.techjunkie.com/apples-1999-power-mac-g4-really-c...

schappim 4y ago

The amount of advertising on that site is bonkers, even covering the text!

catfishx 4y ago
Also the intercepting of the back button should be forbidden
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
  Turn off javascript then it is impossible, barring a shitty redirect.
- Tepix 4y ago
  Yes i hate that Microsoft does it, too
jmkni 4y ago
I didn't even notice until I read this comment, uBlock Origin (on Firefox) does a really good job of getting rid of the ads.
- bartvk 4y ago
  Same here. I didn't notice anything. I just read the article without being bothered about anything whatsoever.
kome 4y ago
Please use Firefox with ublock origin, for a better web.
- sbuk 4y ago
  1Blocker on Safari does the same...
- 72deluxe 4y ago
  Or even better LibreWolf for a better web without tonnes of Mozilla telemetry!

reacharavindh 4y ago

I know the article mentions operational stuff like moving production to a different country and such, but I can’t help but wonder if it has anything to do with all the engineers that moved on from Apple to found startups and other companies that wanted a piece of the magic that Apple pulled with the M series chips.. Curious if any HNers in the know could spill such info with a throwaway

hocuspocus 4y ago
Maybe it's a gross oversimplification but I thought that while the next iterations of the A and smaller M SoCs were designed in California, the bigger M chips are developed in Israel where the team is much younger.
- nkristoffersen 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure its Austin Texas https://eu.statesman.com/story/news/2012/09/01/apple-buys-austin-based-chip-designer-intrinsity/9813952007/ https://eu.statesman.com/story/news/2012/09/01/apple-buys-au...
matwood 4y ago
I think the brain drain story was way overblown. People are always coming and going on any team. Given how long hardware takes to design and plan, covid lockdowns are more likely to have impacted processors that should be coming out now.

_s 4y ago

Side question with the product and processor names; any one else finding Apple's product naming getting ... complicated? Can't we just have the product names based on size, and a moniker dictate its features + processor? Maybe something like; - Mac, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, Watch And you can get them in: - Mini, Max or just "normal size" With your choice of: - M?, M? Pro, M? Ultra Running - MacOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS We've already got a "mini" iPhone (SE), MacBook (Air), Mac. Plus the normal sized ones; 14" for the laptops and studio for the Mac, and then max being 16" laptops, or a tower mac, and the 12.9" tablet etc. Same for the watch too, and the iMac has played around the 21/24/27 sizes already. Perhaps I just don't understand the product differential requirements from branding / marketing perspectives.

mort96 4y ago
You're forgetting the M? Max monicker. I would love to run an M1 Max Mac Max.
zozbot234 4y ago
The closest thing to a MacBook mini would actually be the 12-inch fanless MacBook that was always highly constrained by thermals on the Intel platform. It would be a lot more interesting on Apple Silicon, perhaps for the school education market that seems to mostly use Chromebooks these days.
- davnicwil 4y ago
  it continues to baffle me that they haven't yet reintroduced this model. It was always an assumption of mine, perhaps incorrectly, that that model was a design/engineering experiment that was just the wrong side of the line on practicality but served as a market test for that form factor. Anecdotally it seemed very popular, and loved by the people who bought one. Perhaps the numbers said otherwise, because otherwise I have no idea why they didn't reintroduce it as an M1/M2 machine. Perhaps, and this is maybe just being hopeful, they're waiting for the even better efficiency of the M3 etc before reintroducing it because they want to do it, but absolutely nail it when they do without any battery life compromise. After all, they already ran the market demand test, so this would make sense if so. If that turns out to be the case I'll almost certainly buy one.

dblooman 4y ago

For those people who use a high workstation, what is the typical price? I feel like people spending more than 10k on a machine must not be bothered, they want the performance

rekoil 4y ago
$10k is easily double what a beast workstation has traditionally cost. Yes, you've been able to configure Mac Pros or iMac Pros for similar prices in the past, but it's always been the ultra high-end with niche use cases, currently if you max out a Mac Studio you're up to around $10k. That's with 20x general compute cores, 32x neural engines, and 64x GPU cores, 128GB RAM, and 8TB of storage. I guess it's probably useful for 8K video workloads, but not much else. If the article is right and they're targeting a $10k base price for the Extreme version of the chip, then they better get it VERY right for it to be worth the effort, and I wouldn't expect many customers to be lining up regardless.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
  > $10k is easily double what a beast workstation has traditionally cost I was thinking similarly. Not Mac, but $4-5k will get you an extremely well specced Dell/HP workstation suitable for nearly anything. Staying under $5k can also make it easier to push it through finance where higher price premiums typically require more paperwork.
  - kergonath 4y ago
    Here (research lab doing computational materials science), we get a €8k workstation every three years or so. AFAIK there is no review from the accounting people below €15k. In any case, honestly, the expense is tiny compared to the salary and other costs of whoever is using it for 3 years (close to a quarter million overall).
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 4y ago
      > …the expense is tiny compared to the salary and other costs of whoever is using it for 3 years No argument there, but a line is drawn somewhere on ease of purchasing and it usually falls short of $10k.

jeffybefffy519 4y ago

It sounds like the killed off their own top tier Mac by being too performant in lower tiers.

pulse7 4y ago
It is "too performant" because it is integrated. But because "it is integrated" it can not be easily expanded with other needed "performant gear"...

efields 4y ago

Better to figure out long term production plans, i.e. “we need to get out of china bc the US/china relationship is deteriorating”, before committing to production. This is fine.

andix 4y ago

If they care for pro users (to keep the platform macOS alive), they need to develop it even if it’s a loss. If they lose most of their pro users, a lot of regular users may follow.

ryanwaggoner 4y ago
Eh, I disagree. The Mac Pro market is a tiny niche. I’ve been doing iOS and macOS development for more than a decade and I’ve never met someone with a Mac Pro, so I’m pretty skeptical of the idea that the macOS platform is in any way dependent on a tiny fraction of (mostly corporate) users being able to use macOS for their 8k video editing workflows or whatever.
- matwood 4y ago
  Similar. The last MacPro I saw was a friends PowerPC cheese grater MP over a decade ago. Laptops were taking off with Intel's Core architecture, and I haven't seen an MP since.

gumby 4y ago

If they really cared about this niche market I think they would need to rethink the problem. A lot of the important rendering is done in rendering farms (AKA cloud these days). So build a two part design: a rack form factor with a storage fabric and a lot of processors combined with a super mac studio for display and control, all connected with 10 GB. The investment would be immense compared to the market (not just in hardware but with the end user tools) and hard for most companies to develop software for. The only upside for Apple with this approach would be that their cloud back end could benefit from this development. It's the classic Innovator's Dilemma: I don't see this market being worth investing in at all for a company like Apple.

ChildOfChaos 4y ago
They don't have much of a cloud back end at the moment though do they? Thought they used Google.
- rmorey 4y ago
  Apple runs their own DC’s for some things, but is also primarily an Azure customer, IIRC
scarface74 4y ago
You overestimate how much work is actually done in the cloud. While I can’t speak definitely how much rendering is done in the cloud, I can speak to how much general IT spend is done in the cloud from someone who should know… https://accelerationeconomy.com/cloud/amazon-shocker-ceo-jassy-says-cloud-less-than-5-of-all-it-spending/ https://accelerationeconomy.com/cloud/amazon-shocker-ceo-jas... Disclaimer:Jassy is my skip*7 manager
- gumby 4y ago
  Not an external cloud, but those pixar movies are generated by big server farms. The cloud just resides in pixar's buildings, not amazon's. And that's the point of the cloud metaphor (starting from the original Internet protocols paper from Cerf et al): you don't care. It doesn't mean "a computer somebody else owns"

exabrial 4y ago

Anyone that has hooked up a external drive to an M1 or M2 based notebook knows why: the performance of external devices dropped off a cliff with Apple’s own silicon. Not to mention single external support… Consumers Pro users are likely to look aside on the external IO issues, but it’s doubtful that actual studios would.

sephamorr 4y ago
Can you tell me more about this? Are you unable to hit line rates, or are you just commenting about lackluster io options? I'm looking to add some M.2 storage via thunderbolt enclosure to my machine and would otherwise be expecting to be able to saturate the pcie lanes.
- exabrial 4y ago
  This regression I've personally tested and confirm: You can't hit anywhere near "line rate" with usb 3.1/3.2, though an Intel Mac will gladly do so with the same _exact_ drive. You will experience write stalls and other performance problems. I don't have a usb4 drive to test by I wouldn't hold your breath. I do not have a Thunderbolt 3 device to test. Google tells me it's a problem: https://9to5mac.com/2022/04/18/m1-mac-thunderbolt-4-ports-speed-tests/ https://9to5mac.com/2022/04/18/m1-mac-thunderbolt-4-ports-sp... Expect _at most_half the advertised speeds and feel lucky if you achieve them. EDIT: From the article I linked: I just noticed they suggest try connecting my drive to a Thunderbolt 3 dock first. LOL, ok, I'll give this a try.
CharlesW 4y ago
> Anyone that has hooked up a external drive to an M1 or M2 based notebook knows why: the performance of external devices dropped off a cliff with Apple’s own silicon. This is false in my experience. I bought a Thunderbolt 3 to Dual NVMe M.2 SSD enclosure (Sabrent EC-T3DN), set up the SSDs in a RAID 0 array, and Blackmagic Disk Speed Test benchmarked that configuration at 2,500 MB/sec read and write. That's very close to the maximum real-world usable bandwidth for TB3¹. ¹ https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2019/20190128_1352-understanding-Thunderbolt3-bandwidth.html https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2019/20190128_1352-unde...

jupp0r 4y ago

Are Mac Pros even a viable platform for professional users given the infrequency of upgrades of the platform? Intel Xeon W-3275M is more than 3 years old at this point. Can people with demand for so much compute even afford to not get modern hardware?

mark_l_watson 4y ago

I am skeptical that “power users” need more than a Mac Studio with possibly some of the feature upgrades. While having power on the desktop is great, for real compute use cloud resources.

ARandumGuy 4y ago
A lot of Mac Pro users are involved in high end media production. For those users, the power is beneficial so that you never have to wait for your computer. For a more specific example, music producers liked the fact you could have over a terabyte of RAM on the Mac Pro. This allows keeping their entire library of VST plugins loaded into memory, meaning they never have to wait to load plugins into their project.
htag 4y ago
A very fast internet connection would be 4gbps symmetrical. A modern NVME can read ~5gbps. DDR5 supports up to 51GBs. PCIE6 has a symmetrical 128GBs connection. If file size is a bottleneck for you then you'll see better performance computing locally, especially if you can cache workloads in DDR5 before saving to the filesystem.
- mark_l_watson 4y ago
  True enough. My Dad, who is 101 and does video editing and animation as a hobby, seems to suffer from long rendering and other processing bottlenecks. I have mentioned using cloud resources, and he doesn' want the hassle. He does buy whatever best Pro box Apple has about every 3 years.

jscipione 4y ago

If Apple really cared about their pro users they would have launched an Intel Mac Pro update to fill the gap but they didn’t because they don’t. Pros were ready to jump ship after the disastrous iMac Pro was launched in April of 2017 which is why Apple held a round table discussion with members of the press in April 2017 to allay those fears by promising that a new modular Mac Pro was coming. Two years later in December 2019 Apple fulfilled their promise by releasing the Mac Pro. But between 2017 and 2019 Nvidia made serious gains over the competition which left the Mac Pro obsolete on launch. Fast forward 3 years later to today and the pro market has really started to abandon Apple in favor of machines running Nvidia GPUs. Apple is attempting to create an updated Mac Pro that will bring those pros back to the platform and to do that they have to compete with Nvidia and to do that they have to ramp up the GPU core count significantly which has been difficult delaying the product further.

spicymaki 4y ago

The semiconductor business is not easy. The M-series chip makes sense because you can share it between mobile and desktop machines. The A-series and the M-series are very closely related. Once you start to enter the high-end server market you have to add more IP, change the processor interconnect, topology, and increase the transistor count on the IP you already developed. This leads to the necessity to design another line of processors which needs additional design, verification, validation, software development, etc that you won't be able to share with your profitable chips. You then need to ask, is there really a market for this? When Apple used 3rd party CPUs they outsourced the cost of that server development work, the 3rd party Intel already had a large market for their Xeon class chips so development costs were spread across customers. The business made sense. Let's face it, the Pro side of the business is tiny relative to the mobile market and it does not make business sense.

anikom15 4y ago
My naïve solution to this would be to build a multi-CPU system instead of making a higher performance CPU.
- sroussey 4y ago
  It would be cool if Apple’s Pro machine used an expandable “blade” design, so you could have 4x Ultra/Extreme in a NUMA arch. SOC with soldered memory, yet still expandable. https://twitter.com/sroussey/status/1512934509540360195?s=20 https://twitter.com/sroussey/status/1512934509540360195?s=20

GeekyBear 4y ago

I imagine that it has a lot to do with TSMC's 3nm being pushed back so far. History shows that a very large chip made on a process node that has just come online isn't going to have a good initial yield, and 3nm wafers are said to be fairly expensive. >One wafer processed on TSMC's leading edge N3 manufacturing technology will cost over $20,000 according to DigiTimes https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-will-charge-20000-per-3nm-wafer https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-will-charge-20000-per...

concinds 4y ago

What I don't get, is that Apple lost their foothold in both the creative market & education markets, and don't seem to be trying to address it. Why is the Mac Pro still the same price, three years after its release? Why not work with aeronautics, engineering, CAD, architecture vendors to port their apps to the Mac? Why not sacrifice hardware margins, now that they're moving into services? I read an estimate from a French firm that Mac Pro volumes are orders of magnitude lower than Power Mac volumes were two decades ago; are they doing anything about it?

tibbon 4y ago
One thing to note is that you used to need a Power Mac for lots of tasks. Now it’s just a nice bonus over your MBP and harder to justify
- concinds 4y ago
  True, a lot of this moved to laptops for Innovator's Dilemma-reasons, but surely they have a plan to secure a more few niches, beyond FAANG software developers for the Mac, and students for the iPhone and Watch? The iPad was intended to dominate "what comes after PCs", but PCs never went away; and it just seems like Apple never course-corrected from that vision. That's what I'd like to see: a coherent vision for the future of computing. We haven't seen that since the failed post-PC thing in 2010.
- strict9 4y ago
  True. I remember a video editing class in college and we had to use the cheese grater Mac Pro render our work. I don't remember all the details but I know I didn't want to try it at home on my white MacBook. The gap between laptop and desktop with today's M1 MBPs is much more narrow for sure.
_moof 4y ago
There is an unbelievable amount and diversity of software used in aerospace that is Windows only, from general mechanical engineering tools to highly specialized data acquisition and analysis packages, microcontroller interfaces, optics design, you name it. Getting all that to move over to a new platform would be an enormous undertaking for essentially no benefit on the part of the vendors. I suppose you could do it piecemeal if you really wanted to, but it's still an uphill battle in an industry where Windows is pretty solidly entrenched.

jjtheblunt 4y ago

How is the Mac Studio, which is itself a beast even in base configuration, not "pro"? I also wonder, does the SEC track trades placed by Mark Gurman and those who republish (collectively a bandwagon of such) pronouncements of analysts?

modeless 4y ago
The only thing pro about it is single threaded performance, and even there it's not close to the best available, as Zen 4 and Raptor Lake surpass it. In other areas it's lacking. A Threadripper will destroy it in multithreaded performance with 64 cores and terabytes of RAM. A 4090 will blow it away in GPU performance.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  I possibly misunderstand, but are you suggesting there's an NVidia 4090 on die with the Raptor Lake or Threadripper in some variant of either?
  - wolftickets 4y ago
    I think they mean including a 4090 in a build with either CPU choice would produce a more performant computer.
    - modeless 4y ago
      Yes. And cheaper. I just ordered a Raptor Lake + 4090 configuration from a major PC builder for $3500, which is cheaper than the M1 Ultra Mac Studio.
      - jjtheblunt 4y ago
        What will you run on it that can take advantage of a just released pair of processors? Sounds awesome; thanks for clarifying above, too.

lastdong 4y ago

Many houses dropped apple, not only because of price, but also OS capabilities and software availability. The system became too limited, so where you would see rows of mac pros, you prob now see PCs.

sigmoid10 4y ago
I love my M1 Air, but I never understood why these high-tier workstation places put up with Apple in the first place.

BooneJS 4y ago

I presume dropping a few cores and replacing with PCIe lanes is what’s on tap. But man, the volume for that chip will be the smallest of any silicon, and the yield won’t be great.

sanguy 4y ago

Pretty happy with my loaded up Studio performance wise which has replaced Mac Pro's I've had for the past 3 generations. Thunderbolt changes the upgradability by just plugging stuff in as needed. Only RAM is a concern this way.

Avlin67 4y ago

next gen x86 WS will rip off any m2 chips whether it is intel or amd. with DDR5 8/12 channels and 128 pcie gen 5 lanes the m2 chips can not compete…