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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

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?

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?