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Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
- mciancia 3y agoKinda unimpressive since it seems that it's just mac studio with pci-e expansion
- ganoushoreilly 3y agoMore so given the drivers issue.. I expect OWC and a few companies like AVID will develop proper tools for their hardware but all in it's not going to be nearly as approachable. Also the limit of 192gb on Unified Memory might still be an issue too. We'll see what happens with release, but as someone with two Intel Mac Pros in use, not quite sure I see a reason to switch still (though my laptop is the M1 Air released 2 years ago).
- BXlnt2EachOther 3y agoSince they've now completed the transition to Apple Silicon, I wonder if that starts the timer on deprecating MacOS Intel compatibility. Though plenty media industry users especially stay on older OSes for stability.
- ganoushoreilly 3y agoIt's bound to happen soon enough. I noticed under the dev portal (as of yesterday) the only Mac OS beta for Sonoma was for the M series processors .
- BXlnt2EachOther 3y agoConfig/pricing pages are open now, and it looks like the Pro does match the higher-end Studio configuration. The upgrade choices and prices match too, so they top out at the same spec. Minus the tiny detail of PCIe expansion of course. Pro has a few more ports (extra HDMI and 10GbE, couple more TB4s) as well.
- digitallyfree 3y agoIt also doesn't have ECC as well which was a staple of the previous Mac Pro line.
- JohnBooty 3y agoI wonder if on-die RAM is less susceptible to memory errors? I suspect that it is. Feels like less can go wrong. You have physically shorter interconnects, and the RAM is perhaps more of a known quantity relative to $SOME_RANDOM_MANUFACTURERS_DIMMS. But that is only a guess. However, I don't know if that's true. I guess it's not necessarily more resistant to random cosmic rays or whatever.
- DevKoala 3y agoI didn’t see a reason to upgrade and I feel I am their audience here, I own the last one.
- justinator 3y agoTBF I had the Macbook from 2015 before I felt like upgrading to the M1 in 2021. You usually buy Macs every year?
- quijoteuniv 3y agoAlmost no-one do, however there is a bunch that buys new cars and flip them all the time!
- cpmsmith 3y agoWell, the previous Pro came out in 2019 (and the model before that 2013). Every four years is not unreasonable. https://everymac.com/ultimate-mac-lookup/?search_keywords=A1991 https://everymac.com/ultimate-mac-lookup/?search_keywords=A1...
- justinator 3y agoFirst/last Mac Studio was released in 2022 which is I thought what we were talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Studio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Studio
- ghaff 3y agoI did get an Apple Silicon MacBook 18 months or so ago but my 2015 MacBook Pro is still fine for pretty much everything except ML and video/image processing.
- ttfkam 3y agoOr anything that requires a quieter, fan-noise-less environment that doesn't burn your lap on direct skin contact. But yeah, the 2015 MBP was a truly great model that precedes soldered RAM and USB-C-only port selection.
- roughly 3y agoI’d been wondering how they were going to handle expandable memory with the M chip, since the integrated memory seemed pretty central to the design - seems like the answer is, “they’re not.” Be interested to see if PCI expansion is sufficient to satisfy the Max Pro market.
- pwthornton 3y agoThe approach they took is certainly enough to satisfy the video and related markets. It won't help those who need truly staggering amounts of ram for their workloads. It may not be a big use case for the Intel Mac Pro, but it a use case nonetheless. For video editing, color grading, audio editing, 3D animation, etc. this new machine seems really strong. I am not sure if there is anything beyond that, however.
- WWLink 3y agoI think that was deliberate. I am kinda amused at how they keep on narrowing the scope of what the mac pro is intended to be used for lol.
- gumby 3y agoThey probably have very good data on how their machines are used, and are optimizing for the fat part of the market. This may not be a great machine for training models, which is what I happen care about (I couldn't care less about video). I wonder how big the model generation market actually is though.
- rodgerd 3y agoI do wonder in these conversations how many people are actual users of these things - I'm not, I got a Studio last year to manage my photography addition better, and the Pro is pointless for that - but you'd assume that Apple have talked to major Pro users, and they've said things like "oh, no for training a model I just spin up terabyte instances on AWS, why would I do that on a workstation?", or whatever.
- modeless 3y agoI wouldn't buy a $7000 computer without a discrete GPU.
- throw74775 3y agoWhat if you needed its other features?
- thx-2718 3y agoIt's a computer. I'm sure the other features are available in other packages in one form or another. That said, for business-to-business I bet these are great machines.
- bee_rider 3y agoIf one of your requirements is running macOS, I guess it will be hard to get elsewhere.
- throw74775 3y ago[flagged]
- bee_rider 3y agoThe PCIe slots look easy enough to get at.
- modeless 3y agoAnything you install is a brick unless hardware vendors port their drivers.
- whynotminot 3y agoIsn’t that true of any PCIe device? Is Apple supposed to develop their drivers too?
- lemetr0l 3y agoFor the modest price of 77k dollars!!! I will use vectorization and multithreading instead, thanks!
- bee_rider 3y agoAre you off by one order of magnitude? Or does this cost as much as a couple quite nice cars.
- Doctor_Fegg 3y agoI spend a whole bunch more time at my Mac than I do in a car, and gain much more value from it too, so that doesn't seem unreasonable...
- ed25519FUUU 3y agoCars don’t usually become obsolete and borderline worthless after 5 years.
- cdelsolar 3y agoi still use my 2013 macbook pro and it still works great and fast
- ed25519FUUU 3y agoWhat’s its resale value compared to what you paid? It’s just the nature of technology. I can buy one for $100, literally a fraction of what you paid originally for it.
- bee_rider 3y agoI’ve connected to plenty of machines that are worth more than my car (although it isn’t as if my car was $35000 in the first place, that’s a bit excessive!). I was just using cars as a unit of measurement, to aid intuition. Maybe I was too circuitous in my original comment. I only see prices in the 7k range on the site.
- inasio 3y agoThe Mac Pro link in this page shows the Intel Xeon-based system. I was very confused
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- eastbound 3y agoIs this event entirely AI-generated? Backgrounds seem too perfect, speeches seem too tight.
- jasonjamerson 3y agoWe've been discussing this as well, the Virtual Production production value is incredible, are they also standing on a stage outside, and this is all being composited live, with foreground passes, etc. without green screen?
- jonwinstanley 3y agoSurely it's all pre-recorded and edited together
- jasonjamerson 3y agoYou're right. I thought this was a live event, but the people watching it live are just watching a video, just saw a live photo from twitter. Makes a lot more sense!
- delfinom 3y agoEver since COVID, many companies have basically switched to these "fake live" announcements.
- grouchomarx 3y agoTim may be live but everything else is prerecorded
- jasonjamerson 3y agoYep, you're right. Still they put a TON of work into this. Incredible.
- 3y ago
- colmmacc 3y agoCongrats to Apple on completing another IA migration! It really is an incredible accomplishment to get such a massive base of customers, partners, and developers to run on a new architecture so quickly and relatively seamlessly. I remember the PPC to Intel move, which was also well done, and they'd improved even on that ... with what must be many many more users. Awesome! P.S. Hopefully this transition frees someone to make a Pro Display with a webcam!
- ridiculous_fish 3y agoAnd before that was the 68k -> PPC transition, which was even smoother: 68k and PPC code could co-exist and call each other in the same address space. (Well there was no memory protection in those days, so everything was in one address space. Still, impressive!)
- avar 3y agoYou're both forgetting the ppc32 to ppc64 migration, i.e. G4 to G5 processors. It was a lot easier than the rest, but still come with its own migration and compatibility issues.
- f6v 3y agoIncoming: “Not going to upgrade, I’m fine with my 1996 toaster, thank you!” It’d be actually interesting to read from people who buy a top config and how they use it.
- __loam 3y agoI'm using an M1 pro macbook for work and it's fast as fuck. Seriously considering getting a studio or a macbook pro for some home game programming and asset creation work.
- imdsm 3y agoI have an M1 Air and an iMac Pro (3.2 GHz 8-Core Intel Xeon W) and quite often I feel as though the M1 is faster. Seems to be jumping ahead remarkably!
- bee_rider 3y agoI do not understand why people make those comments. All we know about their systems is that they can load this website. You can be perfectly happy as a dev running vim on an ancient netbook…
- jmkni 3y agoI'd really love to hear from somebody currently using a 1.5TB Intel Mac Pro
- smoldesu 3y agoMy ex-boyfriend had a 128gb Mac he would regularly max out with nothing more than Spotify and Firefox tabs. I still don't understand it.
- pier25 3y agoI think this new Mac Pro is more geared for PCIe developers so they can start testing drivers etc and the big launch will be with the M3. It really doesn't offer any huge benefits over the Mac Studio.
- jonwinstanley 3y agoYes presumably a decent % of previous Mac Pro customers are ok with a Studio
- pier25 3y agoYeah. I know a bunch of media composers that switched to the M1 Studio from a Mac Pro and are very happy.
- mhh__ 3y agoI know (of/first hand) a bunch of musicians who buy the top of the line one every generation because they "need" it. For video work you do need as much raw power as possible but for just about anything else you can honestly get by with a Macbook air these days (especially given that a lot of the top of the line customers are probably using external inputs rather than software synths!)
- m463 3y agoHow many pcie developers are there anyway? Apple had a renaissance with the old pre-2013 mac pro, and mostly people used pcie to add graphics cards to their system. the 2013 mac pro sort of offhand killed that with its mediocrity. But nowadays it seems like graphics cards would need non-trivial OS support, so who would put together pcie cards for macos?
- freeqaz 3y agoDoes anybody have the specs on the M2 Ultra chip? Looks like it supports up to 192GB of unified RAM, which is twice the 96GB of the M2 Max, so is this just 4 silicon dies jammed up against each other? (Apple website hasn't been updated yet with this info, but I'm very curious!) Edit: Ah, looks like they made a separate press release with that info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36199637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36199637
- skunkworker 3y agoIt's a little interesting that that are going to the Video 1st/ Training second model and abandoning the HPC market where they can't compete with high, multi TB workstations. But I guess it's playing to the strength that video decode/encode has right now with the M series chips. I wish that they would have a tiered memory expansion, eg 192gb fast tier, and expandable to 1.5TB slower but DDR5 expandable.
- lowbloodsugar 3y agoI imagine they did the research and found that most people with HPC needs are just renting it, and those that aren’t renting aren’t filling a data center with fucking apples.
- WatchDog 3y agoInteresting that they added a rackmount option though. At a $500 premium too, I guess it’s mostly for iOS developer build servers.
- kalleboo 3y agoIt's for audio/video people who have their gear in racks in the studio, or have a flight case with all their audio gear pre-configured that they haul from gig to gig.
- mschuster91 3y agoThe return of the rack-mount Mac? Nice one, Apple. But do I get it right, a professional machine with zero ways to upgrade the system? Come on.
- mixmastamyk 3y agoDid you miss the 6 expansion slots? The 8 TB ports?
- mschuster91 3y agoI was talking about RAM and the CPU.
- robertoandred 3y agoThey've sold rack-mount Mac Pros since 2019.
- KennyBlanken 3y agoIn this discussion: people who know little about Apple Silicon architecture ("no discreet GPU, not buying"), who are not the target audience for this ("$77k for a comoputer!?!?!"), who do have no idea what video creatives need (see: discreet GPU), raging. These systems (especially the Pro) are for people who spend all day working on 4k and up video. Also, guys: do you really think that any of you are smarter than Apple? That Apple doesn't spend a lot of time talking to top creative professionals? These systems aren't developed in a vacuum, especially at these price points.
- wmf 3y ago$3,000 just for slots certainly sends the message that Apple views their customers as completely captive though.
- sbierwagen 3y agoThe press release mentions a bunch of use cases for the slots, but does anyone actually sell Apple Silicon-compatible cards yet? It's a brand new processor architecture after all. I checked the store page and it doesn't show any. (The old page would let you configure a Pro with more GPUs or afterburner cards)
- wmf 3y agoPeople will need to get the new Mac Pro in their hands to develop and test drivers, although any card that works in a Thunderbolt enclosure should also work when plugged in directly.
- kalleboo 3y agoRosetta works for drivers as well (as long as they use the user-mode DriverKit interface rather than kernel extensions)
- renewiltord 3y agoWill the 192 GiB of RAM be properly addressable by all GPU for AI stuff or are there some NUMA-style constraints?
- chillbill 3y agoThe best thing about this whole event is that they didn't mention AI even once, all they're saying is ML. Which is what it is. AI is a hype word.
- jeffybefffy519 3y agoYet all of their other marketing is convoluted non sense. It just shows them being more tactical with marketing to knock some competition down a notch.
- DonaldPShimoda 3y agoI agree. I was really impressed that even with regard to the Autocorrect update, they used technical terms like "transformer model" without using hype words. They very clearly labeled it as a predictive text engine rather than some magical pseudo-sentient enigma or something.
- dheera 3y agoMuch better than their previous marketing 15 years ago measuring hard drive capacities in "songs".
- neilalexander 3y agoHow dare they speak in a language their users might understand!
- racl101 3y agoWhat the hell is that cheese grater looking thing? I can't make out what that is.
- eyelidlessness 3y agoThat’s the Mac Pro design introduced with the last Intel model. It’s a similar design to the original Mac Pro (before the “trash can” tube thing), which was very close to the design of the PowerMac G5.
- detrites 3y agoIt's the front of a desktop tower, except it looks exactly like a cheese grater and triggers some peoples visual phobias. While it's claimed functional for quiet airflow, it's also possibly Apple's worst visual design, ever.
- davidkuennen 3y agoAs a developer I'd be terrified if Apple was showing my app in one of these events.
- llm_nerd 3y agoIt's all pre-recorded now, so what would the worry be?
- teddyh 3y agoIf Apple likes your macOS app, that’s the first step to being sherlocked.
- dymk 3y agoDoes that mean acquired? 'cause that's more likely
- teddyh 3y agoNo, it means that Apple rewrites your app and releases their version for free with macOS, destroying your business. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sherlock_(software)&oldid=1140188098#Sherlocked_as_a_term https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sherlock_(softwar...
- simondotau 3y agoApple has also acquired successful apps. In 2001, the same year that Apple "sherlocked" the app Watson, Apple acquired SoundJam MP and turned it into an app affectionately known as iTunes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundJam_MP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundJam_MP
- DonaldPShimoda 3y agoI'm pretty sure they reach out to the developers in advance if it's actually used directly (and not just in the background, like on the Dock or something). But I'll bet it's a real opportunity to gain new users, so it's probably more exciting than terrifying!
- tibbydudeza 3y agoDamm the annotated voice mail feature seems awesome feature.
- mk_stjames 3y ago192GB of memory on the Mac Studio is enough to run Llama 65B in full FP16. And at 800GB/s bandwidth, it will do so pretty quickly. I think my M1 Pro memory bandwidth is 200GB/s and I was running quantized 13B Alpaca relatively quickly, I'd say useable for a personal chatbot, and I think it was swapping every now and then causing pauses. So having 4x the memory bandwidth should allow large models to run pretty damn fast. Maybe not H100 GPGPU speeds but enough for people to do some development on.
- jyu 3y agoWhat do you think the odds are we can get H100s or equivalent in Mac Studio?
- kristianp 3y agoNvidia gpus haven't been supported by Macs for a long time. Apple and Nvidia relations are not good for some reason.
- evilduck 3y agohttps://blog.greggant.com/posts/2021/10/13/apple-vs-nvidia-what-happened.html https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2021/10/13/apple-vs-nvidia-w... Nvidia had a knack for putting Apple into difficult situations.
- smoldesu 3y agoI think Apple is afraid of the AI people switching to CUDA and neglecting Apple's own accelerators. Whatever the case is, it's entirely petty - Nvidia still ships FreeBSD drivers and would probably gladly pick up Apple support again (at least for CUDA drivers). If it was as simple as "Nvidia was an unreliable hardware partner", they wouldn't go out of their way to arbitrarily limit the drivers you can run.
- throw0101b 3y ago
- mk_stjames 3y agoI'm surprised they kept the cheese grater case for the new Pro. It is one of my least favorite case designs of any high end mac. I'm really surprised they didn't go with something simpler and more like a tall, scaled up Mac Studio. It's strange that given it is such a big architecture change on the inside isn't mirrored with a physical change on the outside. Mostly I hate the juxtaposition of the chrome legs/handles with the aluminum case. It's very mixed-material. The chrome reminds me of the early iPhones with the chrome bezels. Meanwhile the Mac Studio design is clean and monolithic in comparison.
- Clamchop 3y agoI love the cheese grater but I don't care for the chrome handles and feet either. They remind me of bed frames and office chairs. I think the G5 case was peak design for a tower that's hard to top but Apple's surprised me before.
- jeffbee 3y ago$7k starting price. High but compared to? Just glancing at the new HP Z6 G5, which may be a fair comparison, with a 16-core CPU, 8x16GB of memory (the lowest configuration that populates all 8 channels of that CPU), minimal storage, and a parts bin GPU that nobody wants, $6k. To get 8 thunderbolt ports like the mac pro you'd have to fill each and every one of its add-in card slots with a HP dual TB4 card. Edit: The HP 340L1AA TBT4 card is only compatible with one expansion slot in that machine, so what I suggested is not even possible. Perhaps the Mac Pro is the only workstation you can get with 8 Thunderbolt4 ports.
- zamadatix 3y agoIf you actually want 8 Thunderbolt 4 ports that probably puts you towards that price range anyways because nobody has really seen the demand to make a quad Thunderbolt 4 card yet (as far as I know) so you're eating up a lot of slots which were probably designed to have way more than PCIe 3.0 x8 plugged into them. Same with the memory bandwidth, if you actually need 800 GB/s of RAM bandwidth then there isn't really a traditional option to compete. If you compare with what most people actually need out of a workstation instead of what this can do as a workstation you run into a lot of opposites though, and just as easily. 192 GB as a maximum cap is honestly pretty low for a workstation these days, as is a max CPU configuration of 2x10+2. Overall I don't think it's horrendously priced as some of the previous Mac workstation components could get, but at the same time, unless you have a very specific use case or specifically need macOS, it's not exactly compelling. It is "good enough" to finally round out the lineup though.
- WWLink 3y ago> Overall I don't think it's horrendously priced as some of the previous Mac workstation components could get, but at the same time, unless you have a very specific use case or specifically need macOS, it's not exactly compelling. It is "good enough" to finally round out the lineup though. It's such a specific use case that I'm not entirely sure what the use case even is. Capturing off an SDI camera? Great! Why do we need so many pcie cards and so little memory? These things aren't even setup to hold that much storage. It appears to not work with PCIE GPUs, so that's out. You probably don't need additional thunderbolt ports since it already has those. Maybe additional USB, but probably not that many cards worth? Most audio equipment is external? I get it. Apple is saying "This machine is for a very specific type of video editor" lol.
- ohgodplsno 3y ago>Today, Apple is carbon neutral for global corporate operations and is focused on its Apple 2030 goal to make every product carbon neutral. This means every Mac Apple creates, from design to manufacturing to customer use, will have net-zero climate impact. I love my bullshit green washing of hunks of metal produced by the millions too. Buying carbon credits from I-Promise-I-Will-Plant-Trees Inc. is still lying, Apple.
- hollerith 3y ago>This means every Mac Apple creates, from design to manufacturing to customer use, will have net-zero climate impact. My guess is that the largest contributor to carbon emissions comes from Apple's employees living their lives: Apple pays the employee a salary, then the employee uses that salary in a way that result in heavy carbon emissions unless that employee is one of the very few who seriously rearrange their lives to intentionally pessimize their climate impact. I doubt Apple is counting that.
- threeseed 3y ago> I doubt Apple is counting that. Actually Apple hires private investigators to spy on the activities of their employees in order to determine how much carbon to offset. Common knowledge.
- nojito 3y agoJust 1/5 of their total carbon neutral claim is from purchasing credits. I am sure it is even lower in 2023.
- WatchDog 3y agoAfter apple stopped including chargers with their phones, the marketing department sold it as a green initiative, yet with the new rackmount mac pro, they include a keyboard and mouse with every purchase, how many customers are actually gonna use those?
- whalesalad 3y agoI’ve been draggggggiiinnngggg my feet on a new desktop workstation. Waiting for the store to come back to truly make a decision but I think that I’m gonna go for a Studio. The hacker in me wants to build a beefy Linux workstation but the pragmatist in me wants a machine that just works. I think the Apple tax is worth it here.
- rnk 3y agoI bought the prev generation for that kind of purpose, about 3 months ago. To get 2tb disk/128gb ram cost over $5k. Curious about new prices. The perf seemed good running 65b models but not 16bit. You need the ram and disk space, but the cost was astronomical.
- goosedragons 3y ago$5200 for an M2 Ultra Studio with 128GB RAM and 2TB SSD. Still costs $200 to upgrade a MBA with a 512GB SSD.
- speed_spread 3y agoI'm pretty certain you can buy yourself a Linux workstation that just works. ThreadRipper, ECC, NVidia proprietary drivers. Put Fedora on it. The trouble is leaving it alone and not messing with it after you get it going.
- m463 3y agoCurious - why do you suggest fedora? I'm familiar with ubuntu/debian and arch, but have never delved into why fedora/redhat/centos/rocky.
- inconceivable 3y agotons of people run redhat and derivatives in production for various reasons. it's also owned by IBM. you know how the old saying goes...
- 3y ago
- ThinkBeat 3y agoHow is 192GB of RAM impressive? Why not 32TB? Esp given the unified ram you cannot upgrade it later on either. (I think?)
- nojito 3y agoUnified with the GPU You aren’t getting that much vram in a single product.
- lalaithion 3y agoExample of a desktop computer that comes with 32 TB ram?
- Dylan16807 3y agoLast gen threadripper pro can "only" do 2TB, so 10x as much memory. The upcoming models should allow 6TB, which you can also get today with a server chip. I can't find much using the newest workstation Xeons but they supposedly will do 4TB.
- lalaithion 3y agoIgnoring the fact that this comment has a completely different bar than OP, I’m not asking about chips, I’m asking about desktops. Is there a desktop for sale at any price, from any manufacturer or custom builder, that goes 2 TB ram?
- Dylan16807 3y ago> Ignoring the fact that this comment has a completely different bar than OP, Op didn't say anything else did that much, they asked why apple didn't. Any valid answer to that needs to also explain why apple didn't do intermediate amounts, or even as much as the old mac pro. So I thought it would be helpful to give you examples that have much more memory than a mac pro, even if they're not 32TB. Though I didn't even realize the old model could do a full 1.5TB, so I didn't even need to bother linking other systems. 1.5TB is plenty to highlight the weakness of a 192GB maximum. > I’m asking about desktops. Is there a desktop If you're being picky about desktop versus workstation, mac pro is the latter and workstations are completely valid here. If you just want a link, here: https://boxx.com/threadripper-pro https://boxx.com/threadripper-pro
- imagetic 3y agoI guess I've never been blessed enough to work at a place that will spend $7k on a base model edit station.
- JohnBooty 3y agoWhat do you do for a living? I'm just curious which kinds of workplaces/industries are splashing out for $7K workstations. Would love to hear from people whose workplaces do provide such things. I wouldn't expect many software engineers to be answering in the affirmative but I suspect it may be fairly common in other realms...
- avalys 3y agoAnyone working on a large iOS or MacOS codebase needs a serious machine due to compile times. Apple/Xcode tooling isn’t really set up to let you run the compiler and IDE brains on another machine. Any companies with these mega-monolithic apps (Facebook, Uber, AirBnB) with 16 companies worth of functionality inside one app used to buy Mac Pros for those developers. Now I imagine they’ve mostly switched to Mac Studios.
- arek_nawo 3y agoMac Pro is honestly underwhelming. It's entirely for those you really need macOS + PCIe combo. Other than that, with no expandable RAM (beyond top 192 GB) and no external GPU support (I assume), there's no reason to pick it over Mac Studio (when choosing between the two).
- rektide 3y agoAnyone else look at the motherboard & think, wow, heck yeah? It was barren. Flat, hugely unpopulated, painted black. Seeing such a stark & severely empty slab of pcb is something I've been looking forward to. With more and more on chip, we don't need all this extra componentry all over our systems. PCB might well be cheaper than cables.. but I can perhaps envision MCIO (Mini Cool-Edge IO)/SFF-TA-1002 taking over some day, disaggregating peripheral cards off the motherboard.
- newaccount74 3y agoTwo questions I'm interested in: 1) Are these machines still limited to running a maximum of two macOS VMs? 2) Can they drive more than a single 8k display?
- 1Y3 3y agoYes to 2), the Max can run 3 8k60 displays and 6 6k60 displays. Which are pretty crazy specs considering my Air can only push a single display of any resolution.
- xwowsersx 3y agoWould the Mac Pro help me at all for my computing needs? I write code all day and have several IDEs and DataGrip running, use Docker, etc. I currently use an MBP with the Apple Chip. Would a beefier machine actually do anything for me, in the form of faster compilation or anything...or nah?
- jasoneckert 3y agoI own an M1 Ultra Mac Studio that I primarily run Asahi Linux on. Prior to that, I ran a trashcan 2013 Mac Pro 6-core Xeon that I primarily ran Ubuntu Linux on. Thus, I buy Apple primarily for the hardware. After watching today's WWDC product announcements regarding the Mac Studio and Mac Pro updates, I really don't see myself ever buying a Mac Pro in the future. While I can understand how very large studios may value the additional expandability, a massive case with ability for expensive upgrades just isn't something I would need or pay extra money for. It looks like Apple has targeted the Mac Studio for the largest number of professionals, while reserving the Mac Pro for a niche high-end market - and in these regards, the Mac Pro is a continuation of the 2019 Mac Pro, whereas the Mac Studio is a continuation of the trashcan 2013 Mac Pro.
- tostr 3y agoWould you mind expanding a bit on your experiences with running linux on mac hardware? Especially the M1, what is your daily experience like? Any pain points or gotchas? Reason for my question is that I used to run linux on the mac as well (10 years ago), and I love the hardware. I don't think there is anything that even comes close hardware-wise. But currently I am on mac os, well, because it works basically ;) But I would be curious to know if switching over again would make sense now, without too much hassle.
- jasoneckert 3y agoOf course - I have a blog post detailing that here: https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/ultimate-linux-arm64-workstation/ https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/ultimate-linux-arm64-wo...
- kamel3d 3y agoThe M1 Mac Studio has just disappeared from the Apple website. Maybe this disappearance could indicate how great of a deal it would have been if it had remained on sale at a lower price.
- RegularOpossum 3y agoI would keep an eye out at Costco, M1 Pro MBPs still pop up on sale there regularly, they might get some Studios.
- lvl102 3y agoWhy didn’t they release GPUs for those PCIe slots? I just don’t get why they couldn’t do a simple thing instead of AR/VR.
- runjake 3y agoBecause it's not that easy due to Apple Silicon architecture display controller limitations with the current chips. Note that none of the PCI-e cards in the demonstration were GPUs. They were all network/storage/accelerators/etc. In the short term, I could see shoving an Nvidia GPU in a slot for offloading CUDA and GPU compute, but it wouldn't be really suitable for video gaming and such.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tolmasky 3y agoThe best part to me is that this looks like a "platform" that can be updated year over year. They can just keep putting the updated M-whatever chip in it (and hopefully eventually figure out how to quadruple it vs. just having the Ultra). Ideally they can bump it up to PCIe 5 and Thunderbolt 5 "easily" too. In other words, the fact that this is so similar to the Mac Studio means it hopefully won't suffer the same fate as the previous "one-hit wonder" Mac Pros. An M3 (3nm) Mac Pro with PCIe5 and Thunderbolt 5 would be a very good machine I think.
- miklosz 3y agoInteresting, only single CPU. I was thinking, that for Mac Pro they will go somehow with multiple processors and some magic with shared memory access solved in OS. Interesting though, how the external GPU support will look like if you have PCI and if it will be expanded to the TB4 as well.
- gumby 3y ago> I was thinking, that for Mac Pro they will go somehow with multiple processors and some magic with shared memory access... That is what they did. Read what they wrote about their interconnect. It's just all inside a single package. Look up "chiplets".
- miklosz 3y agoWell, no, they didn't. I understand the idea behind M1/2Ultra. However, it's not exactly the same. Can they put 4 of these dice? And 8? Currently it maxes out at 24 cores per machine, in a rack mounted chassis. That is nothing near what I can get with EPYC based servers. And there I can have multiple processors in a machine.
- gumby 3y agoWhat exactly do you mean when you say “multiple processors”? The way I use the term we are talking about the same thing, except apple can only deploy fewer cores.
- miklosz 3y agoWell, multiple processors mean multiple CPU's, not multiple dice. For example as Dell R840 series, 4xXeon 28 Cores, or R7625, 2xEpyc 96 Cores. I absolutely understand that these are specialised machines for specialised workloads. OTOH Mac Pro in rack mount is not necessary mainstream system as well, and with current approach it maxes out at 24 cores / 196GB RAM or if they somehow double it in a year or two at 48 Cores / 512 if you're lucky.
- 3y ago
- mark_l_watson 3y agoWith fairly good support for Apple Silicon, the $4K Mac Studio might be a reasonable choice for a home deep learning rig. 64G of shared memory for the GPUs/neural units, and CPUs sounds good.
- vbezhenar 3y agoThey're just ridiculous with Mac Pro pricing. $3k for pretty chassis and $3.5k for chassis with wheels. It's a joke. They didn't even match specs for previous Intel Mac Pro, when it comes to RAM. IMO this announcement is just a funeral for this product. Mac Studio is fine, I guess... I hate small computers so I would prefer huge empty box with lots of air inside which is likely to be silent. But not with this overprice.
- ssijak 3y agomac studio is silent
- jeffybefffy519 3y agoDoes anyone else find the specs of apple hardware really hard to understand?
- beezle 3y agoFor all the accolades about the Apple cpus, market share remains within historical ranges (5-10% per my recollection going back to the late 80s). For Q1 per IDC: The top five PC manufacturers by market share were Lenovo (23.9%), HP (21.5%), Dell (16.0%), Apple (7.5%), and Acer (6.4%).
- whatever1 3y agoCan one install a regular AMD gpu in this?
- 1Y3 3y agoI was asking myself the same, but I am assuming there is no way. The specs list only 300W of extra power budget (with only 150W on the single 8-pin PCI-E connector) and the x16 slots are shown as single height on the images. Also I don't think there are any drivers for Apple Silicon afaik and using AMD GPUs purely as accelerator cards seems pointless when you have M2 Max.
- osti 3y agoMac Pro and Mac Studio, spec'd to the same maximum possible Ultra cpu, 192GB ram, 1tb ssd, Mac Pro is $9600, while the Mac Studio is $6600. How many people really need the Mac Pro's PCI-E expandability (which probably no third party GPU's can use) to justify the $3000 premium, in an arguably worse form factor?
- virtuallynathan 3y agoThe live video encode use-case seems like one that makes sense, and likely requires more bandwidth than TB4 can support.
- kalleboo 3y agoThe amount of customers who really need PCIe slots are so low that the number of sales to amortize the R&D on is way lower, hence the premium. The people buying the Mac Pro are probably all going to be high-end video and audio professionals for whom the price difference isn't as noticable edit: one of the PCIe cards they showed was the Avid Pro Tools HDX card which costs $5000 alone. People who need that card are the target market for a $3000 PCIe chassis.
- browningstreet 3y agoAmazing how often they directly dogged Intel, PCs and Intel based Macs.
- tiffanyh 3y agoGiven that the Mac Pro = Mac Studio + Expansion Slots It seems clear that Apple never wanted to launch the Intel Mac Pro (cheese grater), but they saw a timing gap between the trash-can Mac Pro and the Mac Studio that needed to be filled.
- jasoneckert 3y agoThe fact Apple didn't announce that their product line was 'now fully ARMed' during today's WWDC keynote was a lost opportunity.
- grishka 3y agoThey seemingly avoid calling it ARM whenever they can do it. The only place where I myself saw Apple spell out that Apple Silicon is ARM was somewhere deep in developer docs.
- nico_h 3y agoWell there was 3 interesting questions about the apple silicon mac pro going into the keynote: - how will they provide more RAM than the Mac Studio? - how will they provide more GPU than the Mac Studio? - how will they provide more CPU than the Mac Studio? And the answer is « let’s not! » I’m disappointed there was no surprise on that front. I’m sad they mentioned gaming and created a « gaming mode » and then the Mac Pro has no GPU story to speak of. So all the 3d artists will keep stacking green team or red team GPU in their intel or amd boxes. This is not a good sign for 3d authoring software.
- wilg 3y agoIt's bizarre that you'd pay $3000 more over the Mac Studio for zero extra performance, upgradability only for storage, and a bunch of useless PCI slots that don't support GPUs.
- ucm_edge 3y agoYeah the Pro feels like a miss. I figured it would have same specs as the Studio for its SoC but would come with a bunch of options for co processor cards akin to the Afterburner card. So a studio you can kit out for additional specialized performance. Maybe those cards will trickle out over time, but not having them ready at launch makes the Pro feel like an afterthought right now.
- wilg 3y agoIt might have been a good idea to put the M2 itself on a replaceable board. Other than adding some professional video out or capture cards, which you could probably just do via Thunderbolt, I'm just baffled by this product.
- geerlingguy 3y agoI would love if Apple used something like COM-HPC or even the new daughtercard approach Intel and Nvidia are using in their high end server CPU+GPU chips.
- Melatonic 3y agoThey finally did it - you can use an Nvidia card I assume with the new Mac Pro? edit: Apparently not actually - they only list I/O cards and others as connectible. No mention of GPU.
- smoldesu 3y agoApple doesn't sign Nvidia drivers anymore. It's unlikely they'll be compatible with Nvidia cards specifically until they reverse that particular policy.
- bfrog 3y agoOnly 24 cpu cores? Doesn't that seem skimpy when compared to say, a threadripper or sapphire rapids xeon?
- j45 3y agoGlad the Studio is sticking around. For many tasks the M1 Max base Mac Studio became an incredible value. For other than 3d Rendering, the performance bump isn't that huge between M1 Max and M2 Max from the graphic on Apple's screen.
- tiffanyh 3y agoI’m confused, where are the Afterburner expansion cards when you go configure a new MacPro? It’s missing and is basically an overpriced MacStudio without them.
- BXlnt2EachOther 3y agoIt sounds like they're leaning on the internal video encode/decode of the M2 ("media engine"), which they claim can decode 22 streams of 8K ProRes on the Ultra. It looks like this replaces dedicated Afterburner cards? And would apply to both the Studio and Pro. But I am not a video production professional.
- tiffanyh 3y agoThen why does the MacPro exist then?
- musictubes 3y agoVideo capture and Pro Tools dedicated cards.
- _8j50 3y agoSpecs look cool but I haven't bought into apple silicon because I will probably always need to do debugging of x86/64 binaries. The one workload that would make consider apple silicon is hashcat and password cracking. I am sure that's much faster compared to intel but what is the comparison between the latest nvidia 4090 vs mac studio? I don't know how the unified memory affects gpu workloads, but I do know a lot if graphics people only use macs. If I have to buy a bunch if 4090's anyways, macs don't make sense unless I am a millionaire and this was a hobby.
- easeout 3y agoThe wild thing about that 192GB of memory: it's all potentially VRAM.
- dfunckt 3y agoFeels like a missed opportunity they didn’t design the Mac Studio part of the Mac Pro as a replaceable module you could upgrade every other year. Or buy the non-Studio part to upgrade your Mac Studio.