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Apple’s high end desktop strategy has been confusing to me for several years now. They made a big deal out of the iMac Pro, even though that seemed like an obvi

by sylens 4y ago

Apple’s high end desktop strategy has been confusing to me for several years now. They made a big deal out of the iMac Pro, even though that seemed like an obvious quick fix for power users since the new Mac Pro wasn’t ready at the time. However, I never understood why Pros would want to pay more for an an all-in-one they couldn’t self service or upgrade when they probably already had monitors they preferred using. Then they finally released the 2019 Mac Pro at a cost that I thought was prohibitive to all but the highest end professionals. I don’t remember previous Mac Pros being targeted this exclusively; heck, somebody in my freshman dorm in 2006 had the cheese grater Pro at the time for music production. When they unveiled the Studio, I thought that they were replacing the Pro line with that product…but then they confirmed the Pro is still coming. I really do not know what differentiation there will be between the Studio and the new Pro. I’m curious to see what they do with expansion and dedicated GPUs, but considering they don’t play ball with Nvidia anymore it’s probably still going to be a niche product

michaelt 4y ago
> I don’t remember previous Mac Pros being targeted this exclusively; heck, somebody in my freshman dorm in 2006 had the cheese grater Pro at the time for music production. Well, even before the rise of covid-induced work-from-home, Apple has been shepherding almost all of their users onto laptops. That college student's 2006 Mac Pro might have had 1GB RAM [1] - but these days, Apple has a laptop for users wanting 64GB RAM. And it isn't a suitcase-sized mobile workstation either. People wanting more power than that for things like ML and scientific computing will often be shifting their workload to the cloud or a cluster anyway - it's only people doing interactive tasks like CAD and high-end video editing who are buying the Mac Pro. [1] https://youtu.be/l72MsGZQA8Q?t=418 https://youtu.be/l72MsGZQA8Q?t=418
- jltsiren 4y ago
  The switch to working from home made high-end workstations a bit more relevant. While offices had fast and reliable internet connections, the quality of home internet is often much worse. You can't rely on the cloud as much from home as from office. I develop bioinformatics methods and software, and I see significant productivity gains when I can run tests with full datasets locally. So far I've been using an iMac with 128 GB RAM, but I'd like to upgrade to something with 256 GB or even 512 GB. As the Mac Studio is pretty underwhelming from my perspective, the options are basically a hypothetical Mac Pro and a Linux box.
  - lostapathy 4y ago
    > While offices had fast and reliable internet connections, most offices I’ve been around have internet that tops out no more than a little faster than a decent home connection, but have dozens of people sharing them.
  - mfld 4y ago
    A while back I built a linux box for bioinformatics and was happy with the performance [1]. You might need to look for suitable main boards to support your RAM requirements, though. [1] https://www.ecseq.com/blog/2020/Whole-Exome-Analysis-on-a-Mainstream-Desktop-PC https://www.ecseq.com/blog/2020/Whole-Exome-Analysis-on-a-Ma...
philistine 4y ago
In 2006, computing was less generous. A music producer probably needed a Mac Pro for their workflow to be efficient. Since then, Intel has massively reduced the delta between laptop and desktop chips. Coupled with the increase in computing ability of our processors while most tasks do not increase their needs (that music producer does not need more computing than in 2006) and desktops slowly faded to nothing but the most demanding tasks (ML, 8k video production, science, etc.) and Apple has gone upmarket with the Mac Pro to chase this market. With that change, laptops have become the computer market. Look at Apple's iMac offering; they no longer have multiple models and the insides are now laptop parts. The Mac Studio is simply the desktop computer that gets the Macbook Pro chips. Since they don't want to engineer a cooling solution behind a monitor every time, we get a simple box with a ginormous fan. The Mac Pro was supposed to be the computer with the truly desktop-only ARM chip. Even that seems cancelled now. I don't know what Apple is planning.
- physPop 4y ago
  That's an interesting point. Do you know a good reference comparing laptop vs desktop cpu performance? I'm always confused by comparisons that inevitablty are affected by other laptop specific components (differences in mgpu / motherboard chipsets etc).
  - philistine 4y ago
    I guess you could look at the Mac Benchmarks of Geekbench: https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks Let's forget the whole Apple Silicon thing, and look at 2020. The difference in single core is minuscule, but the big difference is multicore. Unless you need those extra cores, those computers are equivalent. Now compare a 2010 Mac Pro and the 2010-2012 consumer laptops. Single core is 100%, multi-core is at least 400%. That's a big delta and that's only 2010. If you go back into the past, it would surely ebb and flow but surely stay in that zone. I'd expect a laptop to be half the speed of a big pro desktop all the way to the prehistoric times when all computers were beige and laptops charged extra to get rid of screen ghosting.
- sylens 4y ago

by sylens 4y ago

michaelt 4y ago

> I don’t remember previous Mac Pros being targeted this exclusively; heck, somebody in my freshman dorm in 2006 had the cheese grater Pro at the time for music production. Well, even before the rise of covid-induced work-from-home, Apple has been shepherding almost all of their users onto laptops. That college student's 2006 Mac Pro might have had 1GB RAM [1] - but these days, Apple has a laptop for users wanting 64GB RAM. And it isn't a suitcase-sized mobile workstation either. People wanting more power than that for things like ML and scientific computing will often be shifting their workload to the cloud or a cluster anyway - it's only people doing interactive tasks like CAD and high-end video editing who are buying the Mac Pro. [1] https://youtu.be/l72MsGZQA8Q?t=418 https://youtu.be/l72MsGZQA8Q?t=418

jltsiren 4y ago
The switch to working from home made high-end workstations a bit more relevant. While offices had fast and reliable internet connections, the quality of home internet is often much worse. You can't rely on the cloud as much from home as from office. I develop bioinformatics methods and software, and I see significant productivity gains when I can run tests with full datasets locally. So far I've been using an iMac with 128 GB RAM, but I'd like to upgrade to something with 256 GB or even 512 GB. As the Mac Studio is pretty underwhelming from my perspective, the options are basically a hypothetical Mac Pro and a Linux box.
- lostapathy 4y ago
  > While offices had fast and reliable internet connections, most offices I’ve been around have internet that tops out no more than a little faster than a decent home connection, but have dozens of people sharing them.
- mfld 4y ago
  A while back I built a linux box for bioinformatics and was happy with the performance [1]. You might need to look for suitable main boards to support your RAM requirements, though. [1] https://www.ecseq.com/blog/2020/Whole-Exome-Analysis-on-a-Mainstream-Desktop-PC https://www.ecseq.com/blog/2020/Whole-Exome-Analysis-on-a-Ma...

philistine 4y ago

In 2006, computing was less generous. A music producer probably needed a Mac Pro for their workflow to be efficient. Since then, Intel has massively reduced the delta between laptop and desktop chips. Coupled with the increase in computing ability of our processors while most tasks do not increase their needs (that music producer does not need more computing than in 2006) and desktops slowly faded to nothing but the most demanding tasks (ML, 8k video production, science, etc.) and Apple has gone upmarket with the Mac Pro to chase this market. With that change, laptops have become the computer market. Look at Apple's iMac offering; they no longer have multiple models and the insides are now laptop parts. The Mac Studio is simply the desktop computer that gets the Macbook Pro chips. Since they don't want to engineer a cooling solution behind a monitor every time, we get a simple box with a ginormous fan. The Mac Pro was supposed to be the computer with the truly desktop-only ARM chip. Even that seems cancelled now. I don't know what Apple is planning.

physPop 4y ago
That's an interesting point. Do you know a good reference comparing laptop vs desktop cpu performance? I'm always confused by comparisons that inevitablty are affected by other laptop specific components (differences in mgpu / motherboard chipsets etc).
- philistine 4y ago
  I guess you could look at the Mac Benchmarks of Geekbench: https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks Let's forget the whole Apple Silicon thing, and look at 2020. The difference in single core is minuscule, but the big difference is multicore. Unless you need those extra cores, those computers are equivalent. Now compare a 2010 Mac Pro and the 2010-2012 consumer laptops. Single core is 100%, multi-core is at least 400%. That's a big delta and that's only 2010. If you go back into the past, it would surely ebb and flow but surely stay in that zone. I'd expect a laptop to be half the speed of a big pro desktop all the way to the prehistoric times when all computers were beige and laptops charged extra to get rid of screen ghosting.
sylens 4y ago