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How will Apple recoup the cost of designing a powerful chip for a product like the Mac Pro, which is presumably their lowest-selling product? Most of the M-ser

How will Apple recoup the cost of designing a powerful chip for a product like the Mac Pro, which is presumably their lowest-selling product? Most of the M-series chips are shared across multiple products, but the Mac Pro seems to be a clear case where using a powerful off-the-shelf Intel chip makes more business sense right now. I don’t see Apple doing it simply as a vanity project, so there will have to be some innovation or new product line coming if an Apple Silicon Mac Pro is to ever exist.

nickolas_t 4y ago
I expect the chip to be used in the upcoming Apple XR/MR headset.
- frankchn 4y ago
  A high-end chip usable in the Mac Pro will draw more power than the M1 Ultra at 60W. I don’t think they are gonna fit a chip like that into any wearable unless the device comes with a backpack with the processing elements (and battery) in it.
teruakohatu 4y ago
> clear case where using a powerful off-the-shelf Intel chip makes more business sense right now. It will simplify MacOS when they end Intel support.
- lapcat 4y ago
  Exactly this. There's a cost to supporting Intel forever only for the Mac Pro and nothing else. Not only a cost to Apple, but also a cost to 3rd party Mac developers, who would be even less likely to have the resources to support the Mac Pro for its own sake. Apple dropped PowerPC support in Mac OS X (10.6) 3.5 years after the Intel transition started, and they dropped Rosetta support in Mac OS X (10.7) 2 years after that. IIRC the last PPC Mac hardware was discontinued very soon after the Intel transition started.
  - iamtedd 4y ago
    You don't think it's possible that the cost to maintain MacOS support for Intel is already built into the price of a Mac Pro?
    - lapcat 4y ago
      Certainly not for 3rd party developers, who get $0 from Mac Pro sales. Hard to sell a machine if there's no software support. Anyway, no, not for Apple either, because Mac Pro unit sales are already low, and trying to make that one Mac model cover the cost of all macOS Intel support will make the already expensive and low volume Mac Pro even more expensive, and thus even lower volume, making it harder to cover the cost.
- vlovich123 4y ago
  Yeah, that’s a common analysis people seem to miss even though Apple is very clearly vertically integrated. Software maintenance costs are so much significantly higher that unifying HW is significantly more value even if the margins aren’t as good. The high end macs serve as cachet status symbols amongst the creators and designers which tend to contain a lot of trend setters + mind share + creative software being optimized around the macs which then means that hardware is purchased at disproportionately higher levels (+ potential downstream effects where if you’re mostly a max shop already, shouldn’t you just get the MacBook Air and other Apple devices to simplify corporate device management?). Also a unified HW platform ALSO reduces software maintenance costs for partners and which is a nice virtuous cycle of encouraging that porting to happen. Apple has a uniquely holistic view of the market place that they’ve cultivated over decades and I’ve seen no sign that they’ve ever lost sight of that like many competitors due at much smaller market caps.
- akamaka 4y ago
  That’s aside from the point. They could accomplish that by simply killing off the Mac Pro line. The question is how they will pay for a high-end chip when they no longer can rely on Intel to spread out the development cost among many customers.
  - pigsty 4y ago
    I feel like Mac Pro purchasers also have an accompanying MacBook Pro and iPhone and are more entwined in the ecosystem than the typical user. Frustrating those people likely comes with a risk of losing high value customers. I think it’s similar to the model a lot of game consoles have. They make little to negative profit on the console itself during the first couple years, but make it up on software and other benefits of hardware lock-in.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > They could accomplish that by simply killing off the Mac Pro line. In the time after the trashcan Mac Pro they lost a significant portion of the professional market. And while that market is relatively small, it's highly influencial. By the time Final Cut Pro X was unveiled Apple could boast that 60% of Hollywood movies are edited on a Mac. Now? Not so much. And this probably extends into other areas, too.
    - donbrae 4y ago
      Indeed. Releasing FCP X as an MVP (a concept no-one outside of software dev understands), without the features in FCP 9 that professionals expect, was a bad idea. I know a couple of filmmakers that switched to PC, partly due to the cost of Macs but also because of FCP X.
      - jsjohnst 4y ago
        > without the features in FCP 9 that professionals expect There was no version 9, nor version 8. ;)
        4y ago
- cm2187 4y ago
  Do we know how long it will take? Apple doesn't have a huge history of backward compatibility. This could be a not so subtle nudge to force everyone to re-buy their hardware at a time people are keeping their computer hardware for longer.
- rahoulb 4y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if they keep internal Intel support anyway - as well as other architectures. The difference would be supporting Intel publicly - with third-party developers. As the target for Mac Pros won't just be running a load of electron apps.
bpye 4y ago
> How will Apple recoup the cost of designing a powerful chip for a product like the Mac Pro, which is presumably their lowest-selling product? In their own datacentres?
- eptcyka 4y ago
  I am under the impression they do not run macOS in their own datacenters. And, unlike mortals, if they need to run macOS in datacenters, they're not bound by their own license to never virtualize macOS on non-macOS hosts, they can do as they please.
  - sneak 4y ago
    macOS or Linux, it doesn't matter - all hyperscale datacenter operators are going to move as much as possible to the highest perf/watt platform (ie ARM). Apple is a hyperscale datacenter owner and operator, if only for iCloud. AWS is already doing so with Graviton. It has nothing to do with macOS. Graviton CPUs are not for sale. If Apple wants a million ARM cores to run iCloud, they are going to have to get TSMC to fab them.
  - bpye 4y ago
    In addition to the other reply - Apple definitely _do_ run macOS in a datacentre for Xcode Cloud [0]. 0 - https://twitter.com/khaost/status/1410332951963869185 https://twitter.com/khaost/status/1410332951963869185
ksec 4y ago
>How will Apple recoup the cost of designing a powerful chip for a product like the Mac Pro, which is presumably their lowest-selling product? Which is the question I have been asking since 2015. From a cost prospective it never made any sense. Presumably they will wait until Mac Studio becoming powerful enough to fill the gap. >but the Mac Pro seems to be a clear case where using a powerful off-the-shelf Intel chip makes more business sense right now. It surely does. Except it will be the only Mac in the lineup without Metal Support and Apple's increasingly important NPU for Machine Learning features. I dont see it as a good trade off.
- chongli 4y ago
  Which is the question I have been asking since 2015. From a cost prospective it never made any sense. Presumably they will wait until Mac Studio becoming powerful enough to fill the gap. To me the only reason they still make products like the Mac Pro is for brand reputation and face-saving. It’s like when a big auto maker sponsors a formula 1 racing team. There’s no profit in formula 1 (for the auto makers). It’s just a giant money pit!
  - kalleboo 4y ago
    Right, as a brand reputation item, if you're building an ecosystem you need to have a clear upgrade path for all your users. If I'm starting out today and looking to choose a PC or Mac ecosystem, if I see that the Mac has an upper bound that's lower than the PC, then in my starry-eyed optimism as a newbie I'll think I might as well start as the PC since one day when I'm super successful and I need more power I'm going to have to change platforms anyway. Even if none of those users will ever end up using any more power than the Mac Studio, if they're convinced they will then they will not choose your ecosystem.
- thewebcount 4y ago
  What do you mean without Metal support? All Intel Macs shipped for the last 5 years at least have supported Metal.
  - 4y ago
tcmb 4y ago
Low volume simply means higher unit prices, doesn't it? The Mac Pro as an explicitly professional high-end machine is OK to be expensive. Its USP compared to fast x86 machines is that it runs macOS.
- ksec 4y ago
  >is OK to be expensive. That is until you run the calculation when the cost of doing it are in the tens of thousands per unit. Suddenly it doesn't make much sense.
  - daemontus 4y ago
    A 32-core or 64-core Threadripper Pro workstation with a few hundred GB of RAM can easily run north of $10.000 and people buy them. The price is not an issue if the computer is fast enough. The question is how fast would a hypothetical 40-core or 48-core M2 Extreme be. Sure, Threadripper makes economical sense for AMD only when "subsidised" by EPYC/Ryzen sales and the shared chiplet architecture. But Apple has deep enough pockets for halo products. They are allegedly repurposing some of the binned/sub-par silicon into internal server hardware anyway.
cwp 4y ago
It may be that an Apple Silicon Mac Pro isn't profitable, but it's still good business sense to produce it. It gives them a way to push the cutting edge in a way that none of their other products do, and the things they invent for it may filter down the product line. At the same time, the sort of professionals that buy Mac Pros are good customers to have, even if there aren't many of them. Ignoring them has hurt Apple in the past. At the end of the day, Apple can afford to lose a bit of money on a small volume product for a few generations while they work out the kinks.
IshKebab 4y ago
Presumably it isn't that low volume. Just low volume compared to their other products. They can probably heavily base a more powerful chip on their existing designs but with more cores & cache, so design should be relatively cheap. Manufacturing the masks etc. is probably around $10m which is probably fine given how expensive Mac Pros are (and it would simplify their software if they can ditch Intel entirely).
- yywwbbn 4y ago
  I think IO would be a bigger issue than scaling performance. Somebody buying a mac pro would probably expect support for discrete and expandable ram.
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    That's just connectors though isn't it? It uses a standard RAM interface already. Maybe it needs more PCIe lanes but again that probably doesn't need much design work.
matwood 4y ago
> How will Apple recoup the cost of designing a powerful chip for a product like the Mac Pro, which is presumably their lowest-selling product? They are not starting from scratch. The Apple Silicon MX chips all share a common base, and are related to the AX chips. When every product Apple sells is using some version of the same family of chips, a lot of the design cost is spread across all Apple devices. Then it's just the incremental design cost that must be recouped for things like (speculated) off die RAM.

nickolas_t 4y ago

I expect the chip to be used in the upcoming Apple XR/MR headset.

frankchn 4y ago
A high-end chip usable in the Mac Pro will draw more power than the M1 Ultra at 60W. I don’t think they are gonna fit a chip like that into any wearable unless the device comes with a backpack with the processing elements (and battery) in it.

teruakohatu 4y ago

> clear case where using a powerful off-the-shelf Intel chip makes more business sense right now. It will simplify MacOS when they end Intel support.

lapcat 4y ago
Exactly this. There's a cost to supporting Intel forever only for the Mac Pro and nothing else. Not only a cost to Apple, but also a cost to 3rd party Mac developers, who would be even less likely to have the resources to support the Mac Pro for its own sake. Apple dropped PowerPC support in Mac OS X (10.6) 3.5 years after the Intel transition started, and they dropped Rosetta support in Mac OS X (10.7) 2 years after that. IIRC the last PPC Mac hardware was discontinued very soon after the Intel transition started.
- iamtedd 4y ago
  You don't think it's possible that the cost to maintain MacOS support for Intel is already built into the price of a Mac Pro?
  - lapcat 4y ago
    Certainly not for 3rd party developers, who get $0 from Mac Pro sales. Hard to sell a machine if there's no software support. Anyway, no, not for Apple either, because Mac Pro unit sales are already low, and trying to make that one Mac model cover the cost of all macOS Intel support will make the already expensive and low volume Mac Pro even more expensive, and thus even lower volume, making it harder to cover the cost.
vlovich123 4y ago
Yeah, that’s a common analysis people seem to miss even though Apple is very clearly vertically integrated. Software maintenance costs are so much significantly higher that unifying HW is significantly more value even if the margins aren’t as good. The high end macs serve as cachet status symbols amongst the creators and designers which tend to contain a lot of trend setters + mind share + creative software being optimized around the macs which then means that hardware is purchased at disproportionately higher levels (+ potential downstream effects where if you’re mostly a max shop already, shouldn’t you just get the MacBook Air and other Apple devices to simplify corporate device management?). Also a unified HW platform ALSO reduces software maintenance costs for partners and which is a nice virtuous cycle of encouraging that porting to happen. Apple has a uniquely holistic view of the market place that they’ve cultivated over decades and I’ve seen no sign that they’ve ever lost sight of that like many competitors due at much smaller market caps.
akamaka 4y ago
That’s aside from the point. They could accomplish that by simply killing off the Mac Pro line. The question is how they will pay for a high-end chip when they no longer can rely on Intel to spread out the development cost among many customers.
- pigsty 4y ago
  I feel like Mac Pro purchasers also have an accompanying MacBook Pro and iPhone and are more entwined in the ecosystem than the typical user. Frustrating those people likely comes with a risk of losing high value customers. I think it’s similar to the model a lot of game consoles have. They make little to negative profit on the console itself during the first couple years, but make it up on software and other benefits of hardware lock-in.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > They could accomplish that by simply killing off the Mac Pro line. In the time after the trashcan Mac Pro they lost a significant portion of the professional market. And while that market is relatively small, it's highly influencial. By the time Final Cut Pro X was unveiled Apple could boast that 60% of Hollywood movies are edited on a Mac. Now? Not so much. And this probably extends into other areas, too.
  - donbrae 4y ago
    Indeed. Releasing FCP X as an MVP (a concept no-one outside of software dev understands), without the features in FCP 9 that professionals expect, was a bad idea. I know a couple of filmmakers that switched to PC, partly due to the cost of Macs but also because of FCP X.
    - jsjohnst 4y ago
      > without the features in FCP 9 that professionals expect There was no version 9, nor version 8. ;)
      - 4y ago
cm2187 4y ago
Do we know how long it will take? Apple doesn't have a huge history of backward compatibility. This could be a not so subtle nudge to force everyone to re-buy their hardware at a time people are keeping their computer hardware for longer.
rahoulb 4y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if they keep internal Intel support anyway - as well as other architectures. The difference would be supporting Intel publicly - with third-party developers. As the target for Mac Pros won't just be running a load of electron apps.

bpye 4y ago

> How will Apple recoup the cost of designing a powerful chip for a product like the Mac Pro, which is presumably their lowest-selling product? In their own datacentres?

eptcyka 4y ago
I am under the impression they do not run macOS in their own datacenters. And, unlike mortals, if they need to run macOS in datacenters, they're not bound by their own license to never virtualize macOS on non-macOS hosts, they can do as they please.
- sneak 4y ago
  macOS or Linux, it doesn't matter - all hyperscale datacenter operators are going to move as much as possible to the highest perf/watt platform (ie ARM). Apple is a hyperscale datacenter owner and operator, if only for iCloud. AWS is already doing so with Graviton. It has nothing to do with macOS. Graviton CPUs are not for sale. If Apple wants a million ARM cores to run iCloud, they are going to have to get TSMC to fab them.
- bpye 4y ago
  In addition to the other reply - Apple definitely _do_ run macOS in a datacentre for Xcode Cloud [0]. 0 - https://twitter.com/khaost/status/1410332951963869185 https://twitter.com/khaost/status/1410332951963869185

ksec 4y ago

>How will Apple recoup the cost of designing a powerful chip for a product like the Mac Pro, which is presumably their lowest-selling product? Which is the question I have been asking since 2015. From a cost prospective it never made any sense. Presumably they will wait until Mac Studio becoming powerful enough to fill the gap. >but the Mac Pro seems to be a clear case where using a powerful off-the-shelf Intel chip makes more business sense right now. It surely does. Except it will be the only Mac in the lineup without Metal Support and Apple's increasingly important NPU for Machine Learning features. I dont see it as a good trade off.

chongli 4y ago
Which is the question I have been asking since 2015. From a cost prospective it never made any sense. Presumably they will wait until Mac Studio becoming powerful enough to fill the gap. To me the only reason they still make products like the Mac Pro is for brand reputation and face-saving. It’s like when a big auto maker sponsors a formula 1 racing team. There’s no profit in formula 1 (for the auto makers). It’s just a giant money pit!
- kalleboo 4y ago
  Right, as a brand reputation item, if you're building an ecosystem you need to have a clear upgrade path for all your users. If I'm starting out today and looking to choose a PC or Mac ecosystem, if I see that the Mac has an upper bound that's lower than the PC, then in my starry-eyed optimism as a newbie I'll think I might as well start as the PC since one day when I'm super successful and I need more power I'm going to have to change platforms anyway. Even if none of those users will ever end up using any more power than the Mac Studio, if they're convinced they will then they will not choose your ecosystem.
thewebcount 4y ago
What do you mean without Metal support? All Intel Macs shipped for the last 5 years at least have supported Metal.
- 4y ago

tcmb 4y ago

Low volume simply means higher unit prices, doesn't it? The Mac Pro as an explicitly professional high-end machine is OK to be expensive. Its USP compared to fast x86 machines is that it runs macOS.

ksec 4y ago
>is OK to be expensive. That is until you run the calculation when the cost of doing it are in the tens of thousands per unit. Suddenly it doesn't make much sense.
- daemontus 4y ago
  A 32-core or 64-core Threadripper Pro workstation with a few hundred GB of RAM can easily run north of $10.000 and people buy them. The price is not an issue if the computer is fast enough. The question is how fast would a hypothetical 40-core or 48-core M2 Extreme be. Sure, Threadripper makes economical sense for AMD only when "subsidised" by EPYC/Ryzen sales and the shared chiplet architecture. But Apple has deep enough pockets for halo products. They are allegedly repurposing some of the binned/sub-par silicon into internal server hardware anyway.

cwp 4y ago

It may be that an Apple Silicon Mac Pro isn't profitable, but it's still good business sense to produce it. It gives them a way to push the cutting edge in a way that none of their other products do, and the things they invent for it may filter down the product line. At the same time, the sort of professionals that buy Mac Pros are good customers to have, even if there aren't many of them. Ignoring them has hurt Apple in the past. At the end of the day, Apple can afford to lose a bit of money on a small volume product for a few generations while they work out the kinks.

IshKebab 4y ago

Presumably it isn't that low volume. Just low volume compared to their other products. They can probably heavily base a more powerful chip on their existing designs but with more cores & cache, so design should be relatively cheap. Manufacturing the masks etc. is probably around $10m which is probably fine given how expensive Mac Pros are (and it would simplify their software if they can ditch Intel entirely).

yywwbbn 4y ago
I think IO would be a bigger issue than scaling performance. Somebody buying a mac pro would probably expect support for discrete and expandable ram.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  That's just connectors though isn't it? It uses a standard RAM interface already. Maybe it needs more PCIe lanes but again that probably doesn't need much design work.

matwood 4y ago

> How will Apple recoup the cost of designing a powerful chip for a product like the Mac Pro, which is presumably their lowest-selling product? They are not starting from scratch. The Apple Silicon MX chips all share a common base, and are related to the AX chips. When every product Apple sells is using some version of the same family of chips, a lot of the design cost is spread across all Apple devices. Then it's just the incremental design cost that must be recouped for things like (speculated) off die RAM.