13 ms·

The Mac Pro’s biggest problem is the MacBook

107 points by samwillis 3y ago

visionscaper 3y ago
Like others mentioned in this thread, I don't think this is Apple's final vision for a Apple Silicon Mac Pro. To me, the only way forward is for Apple to, either use PCIe, or another proprietary high bandwidth bus solution, to connect together multiple Apple Silicon boards. This would result in a Mac Pro in which you can slide in multiple Apple Silicon modules, i.e. Mx Ultra modules. For distributed Machine Learning workloads it also make sense to combine a CPU and a GPU per pluggable module. In such workloads, data that needs to be processed by a specific GPU (i.e. for training), is usually preprocessed by a CPU. In Intel machines with multiple Nvidia cards, this implies that you need a single beefy CPU with high core count. Having a CPU and GPU in each module makes sense from this perspective.
bacchusracine 3y ago
Could it be the portability?
zchrykng 3y ago
The other way to look at this is that they failed to make the Mac Pro enough better than the Mac Studio or laptops to make it worthwhile. Graphics cards are one of the biggest use cases for PCIe slots and is something that Apple doesn't allow. If you are looking for the highest horsepower options, they are all Windows based. And I say this as someone who prefers macOS and definitely doesn't need this level of hardware.
- erichocean 3y ago
  I have two Mac Studios. When I need "more GPU horsepower", I spin up a GPU VM for $0.40-$0.80/hour (depending on my needs) and work away. Then I shut it off. I can't be the only one doing ML development this way.
  - ClassyJacket 3y ago
    Sure. But there are alot more use cases for GPUs than machine learning, many of which are latency sensitive and must be done locally.
  - sarathyweb 3y ago
    Would you mind sharing what cloud provider you use?
    - erichocean 3y ago
      https://www.runpod.io/ https://www.runpod.io/ I do have a Windows machine with an nVidia GPU (RTX 2070 Super), but I don't use it anymore (bought it years ago). ML on the cloud is way more convenient because you can trivially adjust your cost based on what you're doing: Training? spin up something big/expensive. Inference? cheaper (less VRAM) is usually fine. I also like that I can run multiple instances simultaneously, something that would be prohibitively expensive if I had to have multiple machines sitting around waiting for me to use them.
- Spooky23 3y ago
  That’s the symptom. The problem is just a trade off of the Apple Silicon architecture. The M1/M2 is brilliant for the form factors that consist of about 90% of PC demand. Macs are better as a device than almost any PC on a few axes. But… an architecture using an SoC to scale from an iPhone to a large personal server, which is what a modern era Workstation really is will hit limits. IMO, the failure was they were boxed into dropping MacOS Intel support in the near future, and for whatever reason were unable to ship the Apple Silicon they intended to. So they shipped a compromised Mac Pro that meets the needs of a few key use cases that can sorta work with the limited top line memory.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    That implies that the yields were off for the M2 SuperMax or M3 or whatever, so they couldn't make enough of them to sell a product.
    - PedroBatista 3y ago
      Not necessarily, the yields could be OK but the performance bump of the real silicon didn’t materialize.
    - Spooky23 3y ago
      Maybe - they may not have been able to package it. Workloads are usually CPU bound or memory bound. If I need 200 cores to get a TB of memory, that’s a waste of money. Intel segmented their products because they had the similar constraints. There’s a mondo-expensive 8 core 4 GHz+ part, and a part with lots of cores at half the speed. In Intels case, the memory is of course not part of the SoC.
- jmkni 3y ago
  Really dumb question but has anybody actually tried putting a graphics card into one of these machines? What happens? Nothing?
notatoad 3y ago
counterpoint from MKBHD: https://youtu.be/w2KbwC-s7pY?t=306 https://youtu.be/w2KbwC-s7pY?t=306. "the reason the mac pro exists is PCI slots"
- m463 3y ago
  But the reason mac pros had PCIe slots was mainly for graphics cards. and admittedly graphics cards are now more than graphics cards now, they do GPU accelerated computing and machine learning. And apple software would not support those things on a GPU. It is sort of like Steven Covey's progression from Dependence to Independence to Interdependence. Apple with the early intel mac pro broke through from independence to interdependence. That machine used 3rd-party intel processors, worked with not only macos, but 3rd party windows, had expandability via memory and 3rd party hard drives, and used 3rd party graphics cards from nvidia and amd. They worked with the entire silicon valley ecosystem, making their machines more valuable and the ecosystem stronger. Now apple is independent again, and is looking right down into its own navel like a self-involved loner.
  - Kirby64 3y ago
    It was part of the reason. Definitely not the only reason, though. Do you think super fast networking cards or super fast storage cards aren't worth anything?
    - geerlingguy 3y ago
      It's literally the only way to go beyond 25 GbE networking right now on any Mac (AFAICT).
    - justinclift 3y ago
      Apparently the PCIe setup on the Mac Pro isn't all that great though, multiplexing things through a limited number of PCIe v4 channels. So, it'll probably work for adding (say) a single 50 or 100GBe card, but seems like it's wasted a bunch of potential. :/
  - notatoad 3y ago
fouc 3y ago
Anyone know what exactly would be worth putting in the PCI slots that would make the Mac Pro worth it? Also, do Apple employees at Apple Headquarters get fully-specced out Mac Pros at their desktops for their work?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  Nvidia/AMD/Intel GPUs, in theory. I don't see why the Apple employees wood, most of the Apple silicon and mobo isn't really being used for coding and such
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Except for developing iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, macOS, XCode Cloud, Keynote, Pages,... No coding happening at Apple. /s
    - brucethemoose2 3y ago
      I mean the GPU. Most of the area of the M2 ultra is GPU, while the Pro is more CPU heavy.
- BXlnt2EachOther 3y ago
  Might lean toward postproduction studios' use cases? No GPU support, but the slide during the presentation showed extended storage (4-8xNVME to PCIe adapters are fairly inexpensive I think), SDI video ingestion, ProTools HDX cards (music I/O and DSP), 25GbE card, and I think a fiber channel one. Since then a third-party company announced a networked audio card. Possibly some special-purpose accelerator cards; IIRC the first-party Afterburner cards on the last mac pro were FPGA-based; video acceleration is now built into the M2 chips. I think most of the extra ports that differentiate a Mac Pro 2023 from a Mac Studio Ultra on the spec sheet are on a small PCIe card included with the machine that stays in the top slot.
- threeseed 3y ago
photonbeam 3y ago
They’ll eventually have to let GPUs on the pcie slots. It seems like an artificial constraint
- geerlingguy 3y ago
  My guess is it would be possible to get Asahi Linux to interface with a card, but it would likely run into similar quirks that we hit on other Arm platforms (like AMD driver issues with cache coherence on Ampere).
  - 111111IIIIIII 3y ago
    I wonder how powering it would work? It would need a separate PSU.
  - pram 3y ago
    IIRC the actual limitation was the M1 only allows mapping PCIE as Device-nGnRE and that precludes eGPU/video cards. Using Linux doesn’t change this behavior.
    - lloeki 3y ago
      > mapping PCIE as Device-nGnRE Disclaimer: completely unaware of what that means. Does it preclude such a card working _at all_ or can it still be used e.g for e.g CUDA? Would it be possible for e.g Nvidia to create a special batch of cards or design that would work for such cases? (priced through the roof given the small user base but that'd also be the kind of user base who would drop stupid amounts of money without batting an eye)
      - pram 3y ago
        Considering nVidia has the Grace CPU and probably a significant investment in arm64 development, I'd say yes absolutely. If anyone could do it it's them. Of course theres probably a better chance of Atlantis rising from the sea.
- 3y ago
verst 3y ago
I have an (almost) fully specced M2 Pro Mac Mini. Totally sufficient for all my music production needs (which does benefit from many cores). No reason to get a Mac Pro.
- bzzzt 3y ago
  M2 pro mini owner here too. That thing rips through everything I throw at it. I think a lot of the 'mac pro' thinking from 15 years ago was you needed a 'big pro machine' to do serious work. Nowadays, these machines only eat up space, energy, produce noise and while they can be faster the returns are diminishing and you don't need it for a lot of serious tasks. It's a bit of the Unix workstation vs PC market repeat. While some people will hold on to their 'big PC' as long as they can Apple (and hopefully others) will release vertically integrated small machines that offer serious performance and eventually will take over the market.
  - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
    I used to be all about the upgrades: my first main computer was a big tower PC, and I must've upgraded most of the components inside, including the power supply at one point. Always kept my just about 'on-trend' with minimal costs, but buggy as hell, especially under the version of Windows (98, etc.) around at the time. I just replaced my 9-year old Macbook Pro with an M2 mini and, understandably, it feels like a massive upgrade. But the laptop didn't even feel particularly old after a decade, just 'underpowered'. I've realised that upgrading is a nice option to have, but it's even nicer just to not need it in the first place.
a_t48 3y ago
I briefly considered a Mac Pro server rack for an ARM64 build server, but Asahi Linux doesn’t advertise M2 Pro support, and I didn’t want to fight with Docker on Mac disk speed woes (or other Mac/Linux compat issues). The Ampere ALTRA is currently my top candidate, it’s also much cheaper. :)
rgbrenner 3y ago
So Mac Pro is just a Mac Studio with PCIE slots. It doesn't make much sense, considering that GPU cards don't work with it. So here's my completely baseless theory: M2 Ultra PCIE coprocessor cards. These cards could be upgradable, and they would include CPU, GPU, and memory. It would transform the Mac Pro into an incredibly powerful machine. This is a type of product that already exists. And Apple can definitely do this, since they control the entire product.
- visionscaper 3y ago
  Just read your comment, I made a similar comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36543226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36543226
- themitigating 3y ago
  You're right and the people who will pay need PCIe slots for high end stuff like NICs for high speed networks that are used in share video editing SDI cards for video
- DrJokepu 3y ago
  Would something like this be fundamentally incompatible with Apple’s shared memory architecture though?
  - wmf 3y ago
    Yeah, it makes no sense.
  - 7e 3y ago
    Domain-specific accelerators have always had their own memory. Look at GPUs. I don't see why a power user who needs speed would be put off by some DMA. Maybe Apple ends up implementing something like CXL down the line, anyway.
  - rgbrenner 3y ago
    I think it would be compatible, in the same way a GPU would be compatible. You wouldn't be able to use it for your display though (for the same reason you cant use integrated graphics with your GPU).. so it would only be useful for accelerating ML or graphics rendering workloads for example.
jasoneckert 3y ago
The Mac Pro almost seems like a product that Apple didn't care about, but had to announce by WWDC to save face in their transition schedule to Apple Silicon. I can visualize what could have happened 6 months before WWDC: Tim Cook: So, where are we on the Mac Pro transition? Hardware team: We've got nothing. Tim Cook: We need to launch. What's the quickest way we can launch a Mac Pro by WWDC? Hardware team: I guess we could slap an M2 Ultra on the motherboard of the last Mac Pro and call it a day. Tim Cook: Excellent. Let's do it.
- eyelidlessness 3y ago
  > The Mac Pro almost seems like a product that Apple didn't care about, but had to announce by WWDC to save face in their transition schedule to Apple Silicon. This is mostly correct. But it’s also mostly a product they haven’t cared about for approximately a decade. Two revisions, one completely rejected by almost all of its target market and positioned exactly opposite to the new offering. They know there’s a non-zero customer base they want to supply here, but every other part of their business is contrary to supplying it. The only reason they really care to supply it at all is network effects, and they also realize that’s way past diminishing returns. I think the only reason they even bothered besides prior commitments is lineage at this point.
  - faeriechangling 3y ago
    Maybe it’s just nostalgia? Employees can just have a soft spot for “continuing” a classic line and get their way. I mean at the end of the day the product line does make money.
    - eyelidlessness 3y ago
      It’s one of the highest profile products they make, and one of the longest running embarrassments too. If I were Tim Apple I’d have just cancelled the line quietly before the ISA transition, but it’s obvious that few thousand sales is more valuable to the company than the few millions in revenue.
- 3y ago
allenrb 3y ago
This article confirms what some friends and I thought right at the time of announcement. You’re paying $3000 for some PCIe slots. And as others have pointed out, there’s very little demand for those slots. It seemed like a given (to me, at least) that a new Mac Pro would have: 1. Slots 2. Storage expansion 3. The most CPU & GPU cores available in a Mac 4. DDR5 expansion, in addition to the SoC RAM In fact, we got #1 and a little bit of #2 (two SATA ports). #3 is a miss, since the Studio offers the same configuration. #4 seems like the biggest miss of all. Overall it just seems like a pointless machine. The number of use cases where a Mac Studio + TB4 enclosure(s) won’t do can’t possibly be large enough to justify keeping it in the lineup.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  More DDR5 is tricky, as the SoC very much depends on the packaged RAM. The M chips physically don't support it.
  - arcticbull 3y ago
    For $3000 I would expect a different SoC that has a second integrated memory controller with DDR5 support, even if it leads to an asymmetric memory configuration.
    - brucethemoose2 3y ago
      This is easy to say, but tape out costs for a reticle size slab of silicon on an interposer are ~10 figures, at least. It makes zero economic sense for a low volume product like the Mac Pro, even with Apple margins. EDIT: Also, they would have to seriously compromise performance. A number of GPU cores would have to be removed to make room for the bigger memory controller. The bus would have to be even wider with regular DDR5 DIMMs, and it would suck much more power.
      - avidphantasm 3y ago
        The Studio should have upgradable RAM too IMHO, so they could use such a chip for that too, which would amortize the costs.
pram 3y ago
There’s something about the 2019/2023 Mac Pro I never hear get brought up in these threads. Yeah yeah they suck and are pointless and your Thinkpad dug out of a Goodwill dumpster running Arch Linux is 100x more powerful etc etc But: they’re assembled in Austin, TX. Perhaps one of the only things Apple makes that’s assembled domestically? Are we sure the continued existence of the Mac Pro isn’t the result of some kind of tax scheme or trade tariff boondoggle?
- the_other 3y ago
  And maybe also a trickle-down/tracer bullet for on-shoring? If the world goes further mad and US-Chinese relations sour, and/or if the institutional racism of globalisation is finally dismantled, such that manufacturing costs a similar amount the world over, Apple already have a functioning PoC for US assembly.
  - philwelch 3y ago
    Apple is just going to move manufacturing from China to India; in fact, they already are. Mac Pro can be assembled in the US because it’s a low volume high margin product. Manufacturing MacBooks, let alone iPhones in the US would still need to be bootstrapped from scratch, because the scale of Mac Pro production relative to the scale of other Apple production basically is scratch.
sharts 3y ago
Its biggest problem is that it sucks. Go back to basics and value add.
papaver-somnamb 3y ago
I appreciate that this product is geared towards a narrowly-defined type of user. But I'm genuinely curious why would it be more appealing than a Studio with a Thunderbolt enclosure? PCIe configuration of the 2023 Mac Pro: 1 Two double-wide full length x16 gen4 slots Two double-wide full length x8 gen4 slots Two single-wide full length x8 gen4 slots One single-wide half length x4 gen3 slot preconfigured with the Apple I/O card and up to 192GB RAM. Meanwhile, a typical real-world workstation mobo like the Asus Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE offers: 2 7 x PCIe 4.0/3.0 x16 slot(s) Up to 2TB RAM In my use case, I require 512GB RAM (next stop 1TB) and plenty of cores for heavy parallel build action, a Blue-team graphics card, 3 cards of fully-populated Asus Hyper M.2 X16 and a high-speed NIC, plus some life-improvements like a 4-port USB-C card. Requirements that seem to outstrip the capabilities of this new machine. Hey, I love the appearance and feel, and I'm used-to and productive with MacOS on desktop. Up until iOS and newer cousins took over Apple's revenue sheet in the early 2010s, the x86 Mac Pro was a permanent fixture under my desk and a reliable partner. That plus a well-specced Linux box and I never had to worry about being out of action. But since that time, my impression is that it and Mac on the desktop in general feels like it's in decline, neglected, it's software increasingly abandonware, Apple's conception of the target market is every-more narrowly defined and on a just-enough basis, and perhaps most important of all the system's first allegiance no longer to me. Maybe I need to accept or re-conceptualize that Mac Pro today is just for a narrow group of content creators, at least for the meantime... 1 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213661 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213661 2 https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/workstation/pro-ws-wrx80e-sage-se-wifi/techspec/ https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/wo...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- threeseed 3y ago
  > I'm genuinely curious why would it be more appealing than a Studio with a Thunderbolt enclosure Because lots of professionals travel with their gear or have a studio where everything needs to be be rack-mounted.
  - 3y ago
thayne 3y ago
> The former, nevertheless, costs at least $3,000 more But why? I would think with less size, energy, and weight constraints, it would be cheaper to make. Or at least it could be cheaper. And if it cost less, there would be a reason to choose it. So the only reasons I can think of for it to be so much more expensive, is they don't want it to compete with MacBook sales, and/or they are trying to extract as much revenue as possible from the niche customers who absolutely need PCIe slots.
xenonite 3y ago
Hilarious that, in particular for the rack mount variant, keyboard and mouse cannot be deselected and must be purchased.
pixel3234 3y ago
It is weird overpriced ARM workstation that does not even support Linux and GPUs. MacBook is not the real problem :)
thih9 3y ago
What about thermals? Is the form factor of the Mac Pro offering any improvements over the macbook or studio especially for longer compute tasks?
- sdflhasjd 3y ago
  I'm never going to get a pro, but I've recently found the thermal performance of the studio to be disappointing compared to its size. It doesn't take much CPU numbercrunching to slow down to a crawl.
jwr 3y ago
This is true. I'm a developer (Clojure mostly) and: * I had a Mac Pro until 2016, sold it and used the money to buy a second monitor * I had an iMac 2019-2022, sold it because I bought an M1 MacBook Pro 16", which was faster Right now I very much enjoy a single-computer life, much less overhead. I anticipate I'll want to upgrade to an M3 MacBook Pro, but I don't see a need to use anything else, especially as the CPU (what I care about!) performance isn't significantly better in the Mac Studios or Mac Pros.
- satysin 3y ago
  Indeed. I have an M2 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB and holy shit this thing just doesn't break a sweat for even heavy workload and is still small enough to be my every day laptop I can take with me to do basic work on when I travel about. I used to need a big desktop/workstation for "real work" and had an ultrabook for all the related admin stuff that I like to do out of the office for sanity. Two machines isn't difficult to manage but it can be a bit annoying. Having one machine that can do everything without compromise is a dream. Not to mention this one MacBook Pro, while expensive, is still cheaper than what I used to spend on a desktop+ultrabook setup. It is so close to perfect I pretty much have nothing to complain about which as my wife will attest to is unheard of for me when it come to computer :) I had toyed with the idea of getting an Air and a Mac Studio and continuing to work in my old two machine way but with how good the MacBook Pro's are I realised I no longer needed to do that and I am very happy I made the decision to just go all in with a good MacBook Pro and not think about it anymore.
  - matwood 3y ago
    I have an M1 Max MBP w/ 64gb and I'm like you. Short of this thing breaking, I'm not sure what Apple can do to make me want to upgrade. It's very fast, does everything I need it to easily, has great battery life, etc... Maybe if they add something like cellular to the MBP I might be tempted, but even then wifi is ubiquitous now.
- jmkni 3y ago
  I don't think I'll ever have another desktop computer, currently rocking a 14" M1 Pro with 32GB of Ram and I do FE web dev, backend dev (node/C#), some native Android/iOS dev, run docker containers, etc, etc It just handles everything I throw at it with ease, I honestly don't think I'd benefit from upgrading to any of the M2s, or even a higher spec M1/more RAM.
andybak 3y ago
My M1 Macbook Pro is feeling really slow at the moment. I can usually track it down to either: 1. Too many tabs open in Firefox (not sure where to pin the blame here) 2. Some weird interaction between Jetbrains Rider and Unity that has high CPU I really don't want to switch to Safari because I move between PC and Mac a lot.
- threeseed 3y ago
  1. Use Safari. It is optimised for low resource consumption. 2. Increase the memory settings for Jetbrains. Otherwise being a JVM based editor it will be using lots of CPU aggressively garbage collecting.
  - andybak 3y ago
    I'm not going to switch to a browser that isn't cross-platform. Well-integrated tab, history and bookmark syncing are invaluable. I suppose it's possible there's a browser extension that might fix it, but it needs to run on Windows, iOS, MacOS and Android.
    - Moto7451 3y ago
      Apple’s sync plugin works well on Windows and Chrome in my experience. I would guess Firefox should have the same experience.
      - andybak 3y ago
        https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/icloud-bookmarks/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/icloud-bookma... Only seems to sync bookmarks.
- lordnacho 3y ago
  In Firefox, go to about:performance That will tell you which tabs are problematic. For me it was a bit surprising, LinkedIn for some reason eats a bunch of CPU. Or maybe not so surprising, heh. Then just unload the tab in tree style tab and check it when you need instead of having it always open.
mrweasel 3y ago
The interest in the Mac Pro is rather weird. It's an incredible niche product which should really only be covered by select publications for niche industries. The "trash can" was the last Mac Pro that you should realistically consider to be at least partly targeted towards end consumers. The problem is that Apple won't come out and tell us exactly who the envision as the customers for the to last generations of the Mac Pro. My best guess is that they either have NO IDEA who should buy this and only created it to shut up people on the internet and officially complete the ARM transition. Alternatively they have a few high profile customers who specifically asked for it and the "feature set" is tailored to those select customers. People online, like myself, took a huge interest in the Mac Pro, not because we'd ever get one, at least not new, but because the prospect of a high power ARM motherboard with replaceable RAM, storage and PCI-E ports was just to enticing. We just wanted to see how they'd pull it of, and then they didn't.
- cmsj 3y ago
  Apple knows exactly who the 2019/2023 Mac Pros are for - people who will pay for the best specs and need PCIe cards. The 2019 was a very flexible machine, the 2023 is a lot less flexible. Don't expect that to change - the GPU and RAM will be staying on the SoC because that's the architecture every other Apple device has. You really wouldn't want to be in a world where the lowest selling Mac is the only one that still uses NUMA.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Except many of those people need GPU cards, and they won't get it in this model.
    - zarzavat 3y ago
      Apple hasn’t supported Nvidia for years. Those people already switched a long time ago. Apple silicon is rather competitive with AMD, especially with all that unified RAM.
      - 3y ago
SilverBirch 3y ago
I think it's a mistake to view the Apple silicon mac pro as some big new investment. They had one very simple purpose - they said the whole Apple line up needed to be Apple silicon, and that's what they delivered. The truth is that Intel spent a lot of time plugging away at all the different mechanisms that you could try to get performance, and one of those is high bandwidth peripheral interfaces. Apple hasn't got there yet, it doesn't have a chip with a tonne of transceivers on it that it can use to hook up a massive GPU, and to get there they need to not only get all the transceiver work sorted, they also need to build an entire software stack to deliver that performance. All to benefit the lowest revenue product in their line up chasing a sector that's not growing. So what will happen? The same thing that happened with all of Apple's bad products- they'll continue to offer it for sale at incredibly high margins for eternity and never attempt to make it more competitive. Let me point you to the Mac Pro Trash can, it was almost immediately obvious that the product didn't deliver. What is the reasonable thing to do? Do a redesign as soon as possible! What did they do? Quote from Wikipedia: >On September 18, 2018, the Mac Pro surpassed the Macintosh Plus's production life record for an unchanged Mac model, with the Plus having remained on sale unchanged for 1,734 days. It was discontinued on December 10, 2019, after being on sale unchanged for a record 2,182 days. The new Mac Pro is going to be here for a very long time is my guess.
- thebruce87m 3y ago
  > So what will happen? The same thing that happened with all of Apple's bad products- they'll continue to offer it for sale at incredibly high margins for eternity and never attempt to make it more competitive. That’s one of the good things about Apple- you know the product will stick around, rightly or wrongly. It’s not as bad now, but other big companies would try to moonshot with a new product then kill it if it didn’t get traction. Things like the MS Surface and Google Pixel are the recent-ish exceptions to this where you could actually have confidence buying them as they are established product lines and they won’t get cancelled next month ( well you shouldn’t buy a pixel due to the chronic emergency call crash problems, but that’s a separate issue ).
- cmsj 3y ago
  I think it's really more simple than that - they have made architectural choices for Apple Silicon that simply don't fit the Mac Pro paradigm. Unified Memory Architecture primarily. The Mac Pro lives on as a Mac Studio for people who need PCIe cards for their audio/video hardware to connect to. That's it.
nudgeee 3y ago
I see alot of people asking what kinds of PCIe expansion cards are likely to be used with the Mac Pro. Here are some examples, used mainly in pro audio/video/broadcast workflows: RME MADI/AES cards: https://www.rme-audio.de/internal-cards.html https://www.rme-audio.de/internal-cards.html ProTools HDX cards: https://www.avid.com/products/pro-tools-hdx https://www.avid.com/products/pro-tools-hdx BlackMagic DeckLink cards: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/nl/products/decklink https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/nl/products/decklink UAD DSP cards: https://www.uaudio.com/uad-accelerators/uad-2-pcie.html https://www.uaudio.com/uad-accelerators/uad-2-pcie.html Plus 25/40/100G Ethernet, NVME SSD and Fibre Channel/SAN cards.
- te_chris 3y ago
  You can do MADI and Dante over thunderbolt or ethernet, and with the amount of compute UAD DSP days are definitely numbered (as shown by UA themselves now offering native). I don't see audio as a driver, given what I can do as a composer/producer on my laptop (m1pro)
  - nudgeee 3y ago
    For sure — the convergence towards Ethernet based AV protocols (esp. in broadcast) seems like it has a promising future (as we’ve seen with Dante), possibly for video too (SMPTE 2110, etc). But we’re not quite there yet.
    - kuschku 3y ago
      I'm not sure how you'd replace a decklink card with ethernet. The bandwidth just isn't there. Same issue with the TB ports, there's not nearly enough bandwidth for pro AV.
- silvestrov 3y ago
  The question is how many of those cards that would work as a USB-C or Thunderbolt-4 box (or maybe even 10G ethernet). At least all the audio cards should be doable as external boxes.
kayoone 3y ago
It's still probably a good product for big Audio/Video production houses to fill them up with PCIe cards for Video/Audio, super fast ethernet or SAN cards. MKBHD recently did a pretty good video exactly on this type of question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2KbwC-s7pY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2KbwC-s7pY
incrudible 3y ago
This is a very biased sample. Everyone who is still using Mac despite Apple giving NVIDIA the boot obviously isn't doing work where peak performance computing really matters - because that's just not a thing on Mac. Apple will never get there with their "big unified architecture" that's really a scaled up mobile chip, especially in terms of GPU. Apple really has three options here: - ignore that segment of the market - create their own GPU AIBs and a software platform to make them attractive - invite NVIDIA back onto the platform Of these, the first one seems the most likely. The last one would be the most expedient, but conflicts with Apple policies against having a working solution that makes someone else look better than them.
- fooker 3y ago
  Apple is going to do the second one if there’s enough of a market for running GPUs locally. Gaming clearly isn’t, for Apple. But running LLMs might be, time will tell if running them locally is going to become commonplace.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Apple is focused on gaming, however only in what concerns their mobile devices, and for that, the current hardware is good enough for cross-device development.
    - sdflhasjd 3y ago
      Apple is only focused on mobile gaming because they get 30% the money that goes with them.
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Google, Steam, Unreal,...
ManuelKiessling 3y ago
The saying goes that you need a third, stupidly expensive bottle of wine next to the cheap and the moderately expensive bottles of wine, if you want to boost sales of the moderately expensive bottle of wine.
- AdamN 3y ago
  Same thing for menu design. That $150 seafood tower??? That's just there to make the $47 steak ($5 extra for the au poivre sauce and $7 more for the creamed spinach) look like a deal. Sometimes people order the tower but it's just once or twice a night.
- pavlov 3y ago
  This may be the central reason why the Mac Pro still exists. Ever since Jobs returned in 1997, Apple's Mac lineup has been designed around the idea of a ternary choice of "Good / Better / Best". They used to call the Power Mac configurations explicitly that. I suppose putting the Mac Studio guts inside a Mac Pro case wasn't a big design change, as long as they have the Pro manufacturing line still open. By shipping this lackluster design, they can wringe out a bit more revenue from the investment made in the Mac Pro tooling.
- elzbardico 3y ago
  This applies even to car manufacturers. I seriously doubt the S-65 AMG from Mercedes sells in sufficient volumes to justify its existence on itself. But from a holistic brand perspective, Mercedes-Benz would be crazy to kill it.
  - greedo 3y ago
    Halo car paradigm. John Siracusa has touched on this for the Mac Pro: https://hypercritical.co/2013/03/08/the-case-for-a-true-mac-pro-successor https://hypercritical.co/2013/03/08/the-case-for-a-true-mac-... Sad that other than in price, Apple has really just given up on this.
al_be_back 3y ago
>> This isn’t just for pros, Apple seems to claim; it’s for capital-P Pros. paying $15K for a Mac Pro (without screen) to be tethered to a desk isn't a very creative solution in 2023, WFH / remote working requires agility. MacBook Pros are very powerful already. Plus, consumers are going to want more Energy Efficient / Green products, and that means long-lasting too (reduce waste).
- AdamN 3y ago
  Tethered to a desk is useful though for fixed assets where there are multiple users on the device (post-production studio, etc...).
  - al_be_back 3y ago
    I agree. demand for richer media Content is only going to grow, wouldn't be surprised if post-prod and the like didn't become the sole focus of Mac Pro over the next few years.
- tsmarsh 3y ago
  I really enjoy the luxury of both. I have a MacBook Air that I use when I'm traveling or sick of being at the desk, but 80% of my computing is done at my desk with my Mac Studio. git, icloud, airplay and basically all corporate work happening in office360 means that I'm not really tethered to any one machine. Why have the desktop? Power. M1 Ultra is a beast, throwing a little more money at a device that isn't going to die because the battery expired or I crack the screen made sense to me. I'm also mostly at my desk, mostly for ergonomic reasons: I hurt _less_ if I'm in a good chair where everything is tuned to my height.
  - al_be_back 3y ago
    Oh dear, don't tell me about the cracked screen - damaged two in 3 years :( I like the energy efficiency of apple silicon chips, I think they've hit jackpot with that. True, you get raw power from a high-end desktop/workstation, but cloud services have eaten-up missive chunks of of dev work. MacBook is a good medium (Jack of all trades)
avidphantasm 3y ago
I think the lack of expandable memory is worse than lack of support for dGPUs. Everyone doing technical work (e.g. scientific computing and audio/video and VFX) could use more memory, but not everyone cares about GPU performance. They need to figure out the expandable memory piece first. This would instantly open up the scientific computing market to the new Mac Pro.
pjmlp 3y ago
Yeah, in anything related to GPU power, Apple has lost the market, it is either Windows or GNU/Linux at this point, depending on which set of tools the companies are using. That was always a reason why I only use Macs at the employer and not privately, the price tag for a gamer setup. It is cheaper to get a graphics workstation laptop than one of these models, let alone a desktop model with a nice set of cards connected in SLI mode.
LeoNatan25 3y ago
Actually, the Mac Pro’s biggest problem is the iPhone. Or rather, Apple’s one-trick-pony design of their quote unquote "desktop class" SoC to be just the iPhone SoC, but a little bigger, with the only scale options being multiples of the same chip, with everything soldered on the SoC, and then some thickheadedness on “we didn’t design the architecture with external GPUs in mind”. Apple is already getting beaten by performance-oriented traditional CPU systems, and soon, other vendors will optimize for battery life as well. And Apple will still be stuck with an iPhone chip in all their computers. But that’s OK, because it seems they are pushing their desktop OS in the direction of a phone OS too, both in capability and lockdown, so it might all be good.
- sgt 3y ago
  Having just upgraded from Mojave to Ventura, I don't really see that they're heavily pushing the desktop OS in the direction of a phone OS. This is still the most powerful Unix desktop system out there, and there's nothing keeping "power users" (in lack of a better term) from treating it as such. They've been talking about this for years though, and I think with people like Craig Federighi in place, there's no real danger of further lock downs.
  - LeoNatan25 3y ago
    Just take a look at the security hardening at disk level, war on kernel extensions, continued reliance on entitlements for basic functionality (that is not just limited to sandboxed processes). Coupled with bootargs (like amfi_get_out_of_my_way) being broken for multiple OS versions, and it leads me to a pretty clear conclusion.
    - sgt 3y ago
      Yeah you are right in that there has been hardening for security. But little affects your typical power user. One could also consider eBPF as "war on kernel extensions" on Linux. I honestly think there should be an eBPF port to macOS.
gizajob 3y ago
"Exactly who these pros are and why the Mac Pro is the perfect device for them remains somewhat unclear to me, even after testing the new machine for a few days and speaking to various professionals that Apple is ostensibly targeting." Yeah, because you're not one of them. Anyone that needs to run specialist PCI cards, and there are many people out there particularly in video capture (not just GPUs) will need to spend the money on this machine. And as for the oodles of power, high definition video will find a way to use it. We could have stopped at 4K but the quality and resolution chase isn't ever going to end because it tracks Moore's Law. Try being an artist using ultra-high def video for example, and try maxing out the machine for 6-12 months to see if you can get anything maximally creative out of it. Testing for a couple of days just means you're only using it for the basic journalistic stuff you're doing on every other Mac. Just because you can't think of your use case for something, doesn't mean that nobody has a use for it. Finally, if you're producing hundreds of thousands of dollars of value per year, then the ten grand cost of one of these machines is just a tax write-off. It's not designed as some competist's toy at that price, same with the phenomenally expensive display. Apple taxing money off the tax man.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  Are you one of them? The conceit of the article is that the author isnt a "pro" (whatever that means), so they went out and talked to a bunch of people in different industries, and no one had a use for the Mac Pro. > tax write-off Ahh, they just write it off!
  - gizajob 3y ago
    Tax loss. It’s not complex - capital expenditure is taken off the tax bill, so there’s people for whom these machines are phenomenally expensive and there’s people for whom they’re just a cost of doing business they’d be paying anyway. Apple know what they’re doing producing them. Author talked to a handful of people, none of whom are using PCI cards or complex workflow. Even when he talks to the video editor who is using a MacBook for editing, he doesn’t consider that video has to be ingressed in a professional way, he’s just editing it. There are a bunch of use cases for this Mac Pro, and the author has committed a fallacy in saying “there are no use cases for the Mac Pro” just because he didn’t find anyone who needed one. Yeah people can use Linux and windows workstations, sure. It would be trivial for Apple to abandon that sector of the market and stick to devices. I’m pretty sure that once the Apple Vision headset comes out, and perhaps a generation or two down the line with wholly-Apple chipsets, certain people will be clamouring for Mac Pros again (i.e. - stereo feeds from phenomenally high definition video cameras to provide content real-time…). But by all means stick with your shade throwing and sarcasm, what do I know, I just have 25 years experience in the industry.
shortformblog 3y ago
I did a piece about four years ago where I tried to determine who was still willing to buy the trash can, new, in 2019, and found that the answer was (essentially) MacStadium.[1] This piece, while quite good, doesn’t dive into this, but I am curious whether MacStadium has plans to do anything with the Mac Pros that they wouldn’t with the Studios. $3,000 for access to slots that you can get on a $500 desktop seems like an upcharge designed to discourage people from buying it. [1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/pajmk9/who-kept-buying-the-mac-pro-everyone-hated https://www.vice.com/en/article/pajmk9/who-kept-buying-the-m...
lapcat 3y ago
2012 Intel Mac Pro: 1) Expandable RAM 2) Trivially replaceable internal storage 3) Affordable to software developers 2023 Apple silicon Mac Pro: None of the above Craig Federighi in 2017: “I think if you use Xcode downloads as a metric, it’s possible software developers are actually our largest pro audience. It’s growing very quickly, it’s been fantastic.” https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives I personally had a 2010 Mac Pro, and it was fantastic. But since then, Apple never again produced a Mac Pro that I wanted to or could buy. Going from $2500 base price in 2012 to $7000 in 2023 is absurd. If you compare Apple's other Macs, for example the iMac had a base price of $1300 in 2012, and in 2023 it's... $1300.
- bpicolo 3y ago
  Probably their largest audience on account of the disposable income
hstaab 3y ago
I think it’s a matter of lifestyle choices as well when comparing to the studio. A lot of us work on our computers for a good portion of the day, why not have the $3000 upgrade that looks way cooler? People make these upgrades in trim options on their cars all the time.
uni_baconcat 3y ago
Although it has not happened yet, I wonder what will happen to Apple Silicon Macs if the newly released macOS drops support. It is not like Macs with Intel chips, which can easily install an alternative operating system.
- kitsunesoba 3y ago
  Apple went out of their way to add the ability to boot third party operating systems to M-series macs, which the Asahi Linux team has been using to build a Linux distro tailored to M-series Macs. Asahi Linux is still a work in progress but shockingly usable for its age, and will no doubt be ready to roll by the time the first M-series macs have their support dropped. I’ve read that OpenBSD is bootable on M-series macs too, so that may also be an option. Additionally, while I don’t think Microsoft will ever take the invitation, Apple has publicly stated they’d welcome an Apple Silicon port of Windows.
greedo 3y ago
I've owned every Mac Pro with the exception of the 2019. I bought them because I wanted to be able to easily expand RAM and storage without having to use external enclosures. Apple doesn't seem able or willing to allow this anymore on their systems since everything is either part of the SoC, or hardwired to the system board. The new Mac Pro does allow you to add either NVME chips (at an incredible cost) or NVME cards in the PCI slots. So as soon as the new Mac Pro was announced at WWDC, I did a quick check on the diff between it and the Mac Studio and instantly bought the Studio. I've had it for 2 weeks and it's been fantastic. Although I loved the old flexibility, part of that's gone, and part of it is just not worth the price Apple wants. And Apple has just pushed this price way above the value. Now that the performance is the same, they've limited the market dramatically.

107 points by samwillis 3y ago

Like others mentioned in this thread, I don't think this is Apple's final vision for a Apple Silicon Mac Pro. To me, the only way forward is for Apple to, either use PCIe, or another proprietary high bandwidth bus solution, to connect together multiple Apple Silicon boards. This would result in a Mac Pro in which you can slide in multiple Apple Silicon modules, i.e. Mx Ultra modules. For distributed Machine Learning workloads it also make sense to combine a CPU and a GPU per pluggable module. In such workloads, data that needs to be processed by a specific GPU (i.e. for training), is usually preprocessed by a CPU. In Intel machines with multiple Nvidia cards, this implies that you need a single beefy CPU with high core count. Having a CPU and GPU in each module makes sense from this perspective.

bacchusracine 3y ago

Could it be the portability?

zchrykng 3y ago

The other way to look at this is that they failed to make the Mac Pro enough better than the Mac Studio or laptops to make it worthwhile. Graphics cards are one of the biggest use cases for PCIe slots and is something that Apple doesn't allow. If you are looking for the highest horsepower options, they are all Windows based. And I say this as someone who prefers macOS and definitely doesn't need this level of hardware.

erichocean 3y ago
I have two Mac Studios. When I need "more GPU horsepower", I spin up a GPU VM for $0.40-$0.80/hour (depending on my needs) and work away. Then I shut it off. I can't be the only one doing ML development this way.
- ClassyJacket 3y ago
  Sure. But there are alot more use cases for GPUs than machine learning, many of which are latency sensitive and must be done locally.
- sarathyweb 3y ago
  Would you mind sharing what cloud provider you use?
  - erichocean 3y ago
    https://www.runpod.io/ https://www.runpod.io/ I do have a Windows machine with an nVidia GPU (RTX 2070 Super), but I don't use it anymore (bought it years ago). ML on the cloud is way more convenient because you can trivially adjust your cost based on what you're doing: Training? spin up something big/expensive. Inference? cheaper (less VRAM) is usually fine. I also like that I can run multiple instances simultaneously, something that would be prohibitively expensive if I had to have multiple machines sitting around waiting for me to use them.
Spooky23 3y ago
That’s the symptom. The problem is just a trade off of the Apple Silicon architecture. The M1/M2 is brilliant for the form factors that consist of about 90% of PC demand. Macs are better as a device than almost any PC on a few axes. But… an architecture using an SoC to scale from an iPhone to a large personal server, which is what a modern era Workstation really is will hit limits. IMO, the failure was they were boxed into dropping MacOS Intel support in the near future, and for whatever reason were unable to ship the Apple Silicon they intended to. So they shipped a compromised Mac Pro that meets the needs of a few key use cases that can sorta work with the limited top line memory.
- fragmede 3y ago
  That implies that the yields were off for the M2 SuperMax or M3 or whatever, so they couldn't make enough of them to sell a product.
  - PedroBatista 3y ago
    Not necessarily, the yields could be OK but the performance bump of the real silicon didn’t materialize.
  - Spooky23 3y ago
    Maybe - they may not have been able to package it. Workloads are usually CPU bound or memory bound. If I need 200 cores to get a TB of memory, that’s a waste of money. Intel segmented their products because they had the similar constraints. There’s a mondo-expensive 8 core 4 GHz+ part, and a part with lots of cores at half the speed. In Intels case, the memory is of course not part of the SoC.
jmkni 3y ago
Really dumb question but has anybody actually tried putting a graphics card into one of these machines? What happens? Nothing?

notatoad 3y ago

counterpoint from MKBHD: https://youtu.be/w2KbwC-s7pY?t=306 https://youtu.be/w2KbwC-s7pY?t=306. "the reason the mac pro exists is PCI slots"

m463 3y ago
But the reason mac pros had PCIe slots was mainly for graphics cards. and admittedly graphics cards are now more than graphics cards now, they do GPU accelerated computing and machine learning. And apple software would not support those things on a GPU. It is sort of like Steven Covey's progression from Dependence to Independence to Interdependence. Apple with the early intel mac pro broke through from independence to interdependence. That machine used 3rd-party intel processors, worked with not only macos, but 3rd party windows, had expandability via memory and 3rd party hard drives, and used 3rd party graphics cards from nvidia and amd. They worked with the entire silicon valley ecosystem, making their machines more valuable and the ecosystem stronger. Now apple is independent again, and is looking right down into its own navel like a self-involved loner.
- Kirby64 3y ago
  It was part of the reason. Definitely not the only reason, though. Do you think super fast networking cards or super fast storage cards aren't worth anything?
  - geerlingguy 3y ago
    It's literally the only way to go beyond 25 GbE networking right now on any Mac (AFAICT).
  - justinclift 3y ago
    Apparently the PCIe setup on the Mac Pro isn't all that great though, multiplexing things through a limited number of PCIe v4 channels. So, it'll probably work for adding (say) a single 50 or 100GBe card, but seems like it's wasted a bunch of potential. :/
- notatoad 3y ago

fouc 3y ago

Anyone know what exactly would be worth putting in the PCI slots that would make the Mac Pro worth it? Also, do Apple employees at Apple Headquarters get fully-specced out Mac Pros at their desktops for their work?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
brucethemoose2 3y ago
Nvidia/AMD/Intel GPUs, in theory. I don't see why the Apple employees wood, most of the Apple silicon and mobo isn't really being used for coding and such
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Except for developing iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, macOS, XCode Cloud, Keynote, Pages,... No coding happening at Apple. /s
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    I mean the GPU. Most of the area of the M2 ultra is GPU, while the Pro is more CPU heavy.
BXlnt2EachOther 3y ago
Might lean toward postproduction studios' use cases? No GPU support, but the slide during the presentation showed extended storage (4-8xNVME to PCIe adapters are fairly inexpensive I think), SDI video ingestion, ProTools HDX cards (music I/O and DSP), 25GbE card, and I think a fiber channel one. Since then a third-party company announced a networked audio card. Possibly some special-purpose accelerator cards; IIRC the first-party Afterburner cards on the last mac pro were FPGA-based; video acceleration is now built into the M2 chips. I think most of the extra ports that differentiate a Mac Pro 2023 from a Mac Studio Ultra on the spec sheet are on a small PCIe card included with the machine that stays in the top slot.
threeseed 3y ago

photonbeam 3y ago

They’ll eventually have to let GPUs on the pcie slots. It seems like an artificial constraint

geerlingguy 3y ago
My guess is it would be possible to get Asahi Linux to interface with a card, but it would likely run into similar quirks that we hit on other Arm platforms (like AMD driver issues with cache coherence on Ampere).
- 111111IIIIIII 3y ago
  I wonder how powering it would work? It would need a separate PSU.
- pram 3y ago
  IIRC the actual limitation was the M1 only allows mapping PCIE as Device-nGnRE and that precludes eGPU/video cards. Using Linux doesn’t change this behavior.
  - lloeki 3y ago
    > mapping PCIE as Device-nGnRE Disclaimer: completely unaware of what that means. Does it preclude such a card working _at all_ or can it still be used e.g for e.g CUDA? Would it be possible for e.g Nvidia to create a special batch of cards or design that would work for such cases? (priced through the roof given the small user base but that'd also be the kind of user base who would drop stupid amounts of money without batting an eye)
    - pram 3y ago
      Considering nVidia has the Grace CPU and probably a significant investment in arm64 development, I'd say yes absolutely. If anyone could do it it's them. Of course theres probably a better chance of Atlantis rising from the sea.
3y ago

verst 3y ago

I have an (almost) fully specced M2 Pro Mac Mini. Totally sufficient for all my music production needs (which does benefit from many cores). No reason to get a Mac Pro.

bzzzt 3y ago
M2 pro mini owner here too. That thing rips through everything I throw at it. I think a lot of the 'mac pro' thinking from 15 years ago was you needed a 'big pro machine' to do serious work. Nowadays, these machines only eat up space, energy, produce noise and while they can be faster the returns are diminishing and you don't need it for a lot of serious tasks. It's a bit of the Unix workstation vs PC market repeat. While some people will hold on to their 'big PC' as long as they can Apple (and hopefully others) will release vertically integrated small machines that offer serious performance and eventually will take over the market.
- oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
  I used to be all about the upgrades: my first main computer was a big tower PC, and I must've upgraded most of the components inside, including the power supply at one point. Always kept my just about 'on-trend' with minimal costs, but buggy as hell, especially under the version of Windows (98, etc.) around at the time. I just replaced my 9-year old Macbook Pro with an M2 mini and, understandably, it feels like a massive upgrade. But the laptop didn't even feel particularly old after a decade, just 'underpowered'. I've realised that upgrading is a nice option to have, but it's even nicer just to not need it in the first place.

a_t48 3y ago

I briefly considered a Mac Pro server rack for an ARM64 build server, but Asahi Linux doesn’t advertise M2 Pro support, and I didn’t want to fight with Docker on Mac disk speed woes (or other Mac/Linux compat issues). The Ampere ALTRA is currently my top candidate, it’s also much cheaper. :)

rgbrenner 3y ago

So Mac Pro is just a Mac Studio with PCIE slots. It doesn't make much sense, considering that GPU cards don't work with it. So here's my completely baseless theory: M2 Ultra PCIE coprocessor cards. These cards could be upgradable, and they would include CPU, GPU, and memory. It would transform the Mac Pro into an incredibly powerful machine. This is a type of product that already exists. And Apple can definitely do this, since they control the entire product.

visionscaper 3y ago
Just read your comment, I made a similar comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36543226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36543226
themitigating 3y ago
You're right and the people who will pay need PCIe slots for high end stuff like NICs for high speed networks that are used in share video editing SDI cards for video
DrJokepu 3y ago
Would something like this be fundamentally incompatible with Apple’s shared memory architecture though?
- wmf 3y ago
  Yeah, it makes no sense.
- 7e 3y ago
  Domain-specific accelerators have always had their own memory. Look at GPUs. I don't see why a power user who needs speed would be put off by some DMA. Maybe Apple ends up implementing something like CXL down the line, anyway.
- rgbrenner 3y ago
  I think it would be compatible, in the same way a GPU would be compatible. You wouldn't be able to use it for your display though (for the same reason you cant use integrated graphics with your GPU).. so it would only be useful for accelerating ML or graphics rendering workloads for example.

jasoneckert 3y ago

The Mac Pro almost seems like a product that Apple didn't care about, but had to announce by WWDC to save face in their transition schedule to Apple Silicon. I can visualize what could have happened 6 months before WWDC: Tim Cook: So, where are we on the Mac Pro transition? Hardware team: We've got nothing. Tim Cook: We need to launch. What's the quickest way we can launch a Mac Pro by WWDC? Hardware team: I guess we could slap an M2 Ultra on the motherboard of the last Mac Pro and call it a day. Tim Cook: Excellent. Let's do it.

eyelidlessness 3y ago
> The Mac Pro almost seems like a product that Apple didn't care about, but had to announce by WWDC to save face in their transition schedule to Apple Silicon. This is mostly correct. But it’s also mostly a product they haven’t cared about for approximately a decade. Two revisions, one completely rejected by almost all of its target market and positioned exactly opposite to the new offering. They know there’s a non-zero customer base they want to supply here, but every other part of their business is contrary to supplying it. The only reason they really care to supply it at all is network effects, and they also realize that’s way past diminishing returns. I think the only reason they even bothered besides prior commitments is lineage at this point.
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  Maybe it’s just nostalgia? Employees can just have a soft spot for “continuing” a classic line and get their way. I mean at the end of the day the product line does make money.
  - eyelidlessness 3y ago
    It’s one of the highest profile products they make, and one of the longest running embarrassments too. If I were Tim Apple I’d have just cancelled the line quietly before the ISA transition, but it’s obvious that few thousand sales is more valuable to the company than the few millions in revenue.
3y ago

allenrb 3y ago

This article confirms what some friends and I thought right at the time of announcement. You’re paying $3000 for some PCIe slots. And as others have pointed out, there’s very little demand for those slots. It seemed like a given (to me, at least) that a new Mac Pro would have: 1. Slots 2. Storage expansion 3. The most CPU & GPU cores available in a Mac 4. DDR5 expansion, in addition to the SoC RAM In fact, we got #1 and a little bit of #2 (two SATA ports). #3 is a miss, since the Studio offers the same configuration. #4 seems like the biggest miss of all. Overall it just seems like a pointless machine. The number of use cases where a Mac Studio + TB4 enclosure(s) won’t do can’t possibly be large enough to justify keeping it in the lineup.

brucethemoose2 3y ago
More DDR5 is tricky, as the SoC very much depends on the packaged RAM. The M chips physically don't support it.
- arcticbull 3y ago
  For $3000 I would expect a different SoC that has a second integrated memory controller with DDR5 support, even if it leads to an asymmetric memory configuration.
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    This is easy to say, but tape out costs for a reticle size slab of silicon on an interposer are ~10 figures, at least. It makes zero economic sense for a low volume product like the Mac Pro, even with Apple margins. EDIT: Also, they would have to seriously compromise performance. A number of GPU cores would have to be removed to make room for the bigger memory controller. The bus would have to be even wider with regular DDR5 DIMMs, and it would suck much more power.
    - avidphantasm 3y ago
      The Studio should have upgradable RAM too IMHO, so they could use such a chip for that too, which would amortize the costs.

pram 3y ago

There’s something about the 2019/2023 Mac Pro I never hear get brought up in these threads. Yeah yeah they suck and are pointless and your Thinkpad dug out of a Goodwill dumpster running Arch Linux is 100x more powerful etc etc But: they’re assembled in Austin, TX. Perhaps one of the only things Apple makes that’s assembled domestically? Are we sure the continued existence of the Mac Pro isn’t the result of some kind of tax scheme or trade tariff boondoggle?

the_other 3y ago
And maybe also a trickle-down/tracer bullet for on-shoring? If the world goes further mad and US-Chinese relations sour, and/or if the institutional racism of globalisation is finally dismantled, such that manufacturing costs a similar amount the world over, Apple already have a functioning PoC for US assembly.
- philwelch 3y ago
  Apple is just going to move manufacturing from China to India; in fact, they already are. Mac Pro can be assembled in the US because it’s a low volume high margin product. Manufacturing MacBooks, let alone iPhones in the US would still need to be bootstrapped from scratch, because the scale of Mac Pro production relative to the scale of other Apple production basically is scratch.

sharts 3y ago

Its biggest problem is that it sucks. Go back to basics and value add.

papaver-somnamb 3y ago

I appreciate that this product is geared towards a narrowly-defined type of user. But I'm genuinely curious why would it be more appealing than a Studio with a Thunderbolt enclosure? PCIe configuration of the 2023 Mac Pro: 1 Two double-wide full length x16 gen4 slots Two double-wide full length x8 gen4 slots Two single-wide full length x8 gen4 slots One single-wide half length x4 gen3 slot preconfigured with the Apple I/O card and up to 192GB RAM. Meanwhile, a typical real-world workstation mobo like the Asus Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE offers: 2 7 x PCIe 4.0/3.0 x16 slot(s) Up to 2TB RAM In my use case, I require 512GB RAM (next stop 1TB) and plenty of cores for heavy parallel build action, a Blue-team graphics card, 3 cards of fully-populated Asus Hyper M.2 X16 and a high-speed NIC, plus some life-improvements like a 4-port USB-C card. Requirements that seem to outstrip the capabilities of this new machine. Hey, I love the appearance and feel, and I'm used-to and productive with MacOS on desktop. Up until iOS and newer cousins took over Apple's revenue sheet in the early 2010s, the x86 Mac Pro was a permanent fixture under my desk and a reliable partner. That plus a well-specced Linux box and I never had to worry about being out of action. But since that time, my impression is that it and Mac on the desktop in general feels like it's in decline, neglected, it's software increasingly abandonware, Apple's conception of the target market is every-more narrowly defined and on a just-enough basis, and perhaps most important of all the system's first allegiance no longer to me. Maybe I need to accept or re-conceptualize that Mac Pro today is just for a narrow group of content creators, at least for the meantime... 1 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213661 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213661 2 https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/workstation/pro-ws-wrx80e-sage-se-wifi/techspec/ https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/wo...

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
threeseed 3y ago
> I'm genuinely curious why would it be more appealing than a Studio with a Thunderbolt enclosure Because lots of professionals travel with their gear or have a studio where everything needs to be be rack-mounted.
- 3y ago

thayne 3y ago

> The former, nevertheless, costs at least $3,000 more But why? I would think with less size, energy, and weight constraints, it would be cheaper to make. Or at least it could be cheaper. And if it cost less, there would be a reason to choose it. So the only reasons I can think of for it to be so much more expensive, is they don't want it to compete with MacBook sales, and/or they are trying to extract as much revenue as possible from the niche customers who absolutely need PCIe slots.

xenonite 3y ago

Hilarious that, in particular for the rack mount variant, keyboard and mouse cannot be deselected and must be purchased.

pixel3234 3y ago

It is weird overpriced ARM workstation that does not even support Linux and GPUs. MacBook is not the real problem :)

thih9 3y ago

What about thermals? Is the form factor of the Mac Pro offering any improvements over the macbook or studio especially for longer compute tasks?

sdflhasjd 3y ago
I'm never going to get a pro, but I've recently found the thermal performance of the studio to be disappointing compared to its size. It doesn't take much CPU numbercrunching to slow down to a crawl.

jwr 3y ago

This is true. I'm a developer (Clojure mostly) and: * I had a Mac Pro until 2016, sold it and used the money to buy a second monitor * I had an iMac 2019-2022, sold it because I bought an M1 MacBook Pro 16", which was faster Right now I very much enjoy a single-computer life, much less overhead. I anticipate I'll want to upgrade to an M3 MacBook Pro, but I don't see a need to use anything else, especially as the CPU (what I care about!) performance isn't significantly better in the Mac Studios or Mac Pros.

satysin 3y ago
Indeed. I have an M2 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB and holy shit this thing just doesn't break a sweat for even heavy workload and is still small enough to be my every day laptop I can take with me to do basic work on when I travel about. I used to need a big desktop/workstation for "real work" and had an ultrabook for all the related admin stuff that I like to do out of the office for sanity. Two machines isn't difficult to manage but it can be a bit annoying. Having one machine that can do everything without compromise is a dream. Not to mention this one MacBook Pro, while expensive, is still cheaper than what I used to spend on a desktop+ultrabook setup. It is so close to perfect I pretty much have nothing to complain about which as my wife will attest to is unheard of for me when it come to computer :) I had toyed with the idea of getting an Air and a Mac Studio and continuing to work in my old two machine way but with how good the MacBook Pro's are I realised I no longer needed to do that and I am very happy I made the decision to just go all in with a good MacBook Pro and not think about it anymore.
- matwood 3y ago
  I have an M1 Max MBP w/ 64gb and I'm like you. Short of this thing breaking, I'm not sure what Apple can do to make me want to upgrade. It's very fast, does everything I need it to easily, has great battery life, etc... Maybe if they add something like cellular to the MBP I might be tempted, but even then wifi is ubiquitous now.
jmkni 3y ago
I don't think I'll ever have another desktop computer, currently rocking a 14" M1 Pro with 32GB of Ram and I do FE web dev, backend dev (node/C#), some native Android/iOS dev, run docker containers, etc, etc It just handles everything I throw at it with ease, I honestly don't think I'd benefit from upgrading to any of the M2s, or even a higher spec M1/more RAM.

andybak 3y ago

My M1 Macbook Pro is feeling really slow at the moment. I can usually track it down to either: 1. Too many tabs open in Firefox (not sure where to pin the blame here) 2. Some weird interaction between Jetbrains Rider and Unity that has high CPU I really don't want to switch to Safari because I move between PC and Mac a lot.

threeseed 3y ago
1. Use Safari. It is optimised for low resource consumption. 2. Increase the memory settings for Jetbrains. Otherwise being a JVM based editor it will be using lots of CPU aggressively garbage collecting.
- andybak 3y ago
  I'm not going to switch to a browser that isn't cross-platform. Well-integrated tab, history and bookmark syncing are invaluable. I suppose it's possible there's a browser extension that might fix it, but it needs to run on Windows, iOS, MacOS and Android.
  - Moto7451 3y ago
    Apple’s sync plugin works well on Windows and Chrome in my experience. I would guess Firefox should have the same experience.
    - andybak 3y ago
      https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/icloud-bookmarks/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/icloud-bookma... Only seems to sync bookmarks.
lordnacho 3y ago
In Firefox, go to about:performance That will tell you which tabs are problematic. For me it was a bit surprising, LinkedIn for some reason eats a bunch of CPU. Or maybe not so surprising, heh. Then just unload the tab in tree style tab and check it when you need instead of having it always open.

mrweasel 3y ago

The interest in the Mac Pro is rather weird. It's an incredible niche product which should really only be covered by select publications for niche industries. The "trash can" was the last Mac Pro that you should realistically consider to be at least partly targeted towards end consumers. The problem is that Apple won't come out and tell us exactly who the envision as the customers for the to last generations of the Mac Pro. My best guess is that they either have NO IDEA who should buy this and only created it to shut up people on the internet and officially complete the ARM transition. Alternatively they have a few high profile customers who specifically asked for it and the "feature set" is tailored to those select customers. People online, like myself, took a huge interest in the Mac Pro, not because we'd ever get one, at least not new, but because the prospect of a high power ARM motherboard with replaceable RAM, storage and PCI-E ports was just to enticing. We just wanted to see how they'd pull it of, and then they didn't.

cmsj 3y ago
Apple knows exactly who the 2019/2023 Mac Pros are for - people who will pay for the best specs and need PCIe cards. The 2019 was a very flexible machine, the 2023 is a lot less flexible. Don't expect that to change - the GPU and RAM will be staying on the SoC because that's the architecture every other Apple device has. You really wouldn't want to be in a world where the lowest selling Mac is the only one that still uses NUMA.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Except many of those people need GPU cards, and they won't get it in this model.
  - zarzavat 3y ago
    Apple hasn’t supported Nvidia for years. Those people already switched a long time ago. Apple silicon is rather competitive with AMD, especially with all that unified RAM.
    - 3y ago

SilverBirch 3y ago

I think it's a mistake to view the Apple silicon mac pro as some big new investment. They had one very simple purpose - they said the whole Apple line up needed to be Apple silicon, and that's what they delivered. The truth is that Intel spent a lot of time plugging away at all the different mechanisms that you could try to get performance, and one of those is high bandwidth peripheral interfaces. Apple hasn't got there yet, it doesn't have a chip with a tonne of transceivers on it that it can use to hook up a massive GPU, and to get there they need to not only get all the transceiver work sorted, they also need to build an entire software stack to deliver that performance. All to benefit the lowest revenue product in their line up chasing a sector that's not growing. So what will happen? The same thing that happened with all of Apple's bad products- they'll continue to offer it for sale at incredibly high margins for eternity and never attempt to make it more competitive. Let me point you to the Mac Pro Trash can, it was almost immediately obvious that the product didn't deliver. What is the reasonable thing to do? Do a redesign as soon as possible! What did they do? Quote from Wikipedia: >On September 18, 2018, the Mac Pro surpassed the Macintosh Plus's production life record for an unchanged Mac model, with the Plus having remained on sale unchanged for 1,734 days. It was discontinued on December 10, 2019, after being on sale unchanged for a record 2,182 days. The new Mac Pro is going to be here for a very long time is my guess.

thebruce87m 3y ago
> So what will happen? The same thing that happened with all of Apple's bad products- they'll continue to offer it for sale at incredibly high margins for eternity and never attempt to make it more competitive. That’s one of the good things about Apple- you know the product will stick around, rightly or wrongly. It’s not as bad now, but other big companies would try to moonshot with a new product then kill it if it didn’t get traction. Things like the MS Surface and Google Pixel are the recent-ish exceptions to this where you could actually have confidence buying them as they are established product lines and they won’t get cancelled next month ( well you shouldn’t buy a pixel due to the chronic emergency call crash problems, but that’s a separate issue ).
cmsj 3y ago
I think it's really more simple than that - they have made architectural choices for Apple Silicon that simply don't fit the Mac Pro paradigm. Unified Memory Architecture primarily. The Mac Pro lives on as a Mac Studio for people who need PCIe cards for their audio/video hardware to connect to. That's it.

nudgeee 3y ago

I see alot of people asking what kinds of PCIe expansion cards are likely to be used with the Mac Pro. Here are some examples, used mainly in pro audio/video/broadcast workflows: RME MADI/AES cards: https://www.rme-audio.de/internal-cards.html https://www.rme-audio.de/internal-cards.html ProTools HDX cards: https://www.avid.com/products/pro-tools-hdx https://www.avid.com/products/pro-tools-hdx BlackMagic DeckLink cards: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/nl/products/decklink https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/nl/products/decklink UAD DSP cards: https://www.uaudio.com/uad-accelerators/uad-2-pcie.html https://www.uaudio.com/uad-accelerators/uad-2-pcie.html Plus 25/40/100G Ethernet, NVME SSD and Fibre Channel/SAN cards.

te_chris 3y ago
You can do MADI and Dante over thunderbolt or ethernet, and with the amount of compute UAD DSP days are definitely numbered (as shown by UA themselves now offering native). I don't see audio as a driver, given what I can do as a composer/producer on my laptop (m1pro)
- nudgeee 3y ago
  For sure — the convergence towards Ethernet based AV protocols (esp. in broadcast) seems like it has a promising future (as we’ve seen with Dante), possibly for video too (SMPTE 2110, etc). But we’re not quite there yet.
  - kuschku 3y ago
    I'm not sure how you'd replace a decklink card with ethernet. The bandwidth just isn't there. Same issue with the TB ports, there's not nearly enough bandwidth for pro AV.
silvestrov 3y ago
The question is how many of those cards that would work as a USB-C or Thunderbolt-4 box (or maybe even 10G ethernet). At least all the audio cards should be doable as external boxes.

kayoone 3y ago

It's still probably a good product for big Audio/Video production houses to fill them up with PCIe cards for Video/Audio, super fast ethernet or SAN cards. MKBHD recently did a pretty good video exactly on this type of question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2KbwC-s7pY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2KbwC-s7pY

incrudible 3y ago

This is a very biased sample. Everyone who is still using Mac despite Apple giving NVIDIA the boot obviously isn't doing work where peak performance computing really matters - because that's just not a thing on Mac. Apple will never get there with their "big unified architecture" that's really a scaled up mobile chip, especially in terms of GPU. Apple really has three options here: - ignore that segment of the market - create their own GPU AIBs and a software platform to make them attractive - invite NVIDIA back onto the platform Of these, the first one seems the most likely. The last one would be the most expedient, but conflicts with Apple policies against having a working solution that makes someone else look better than them.

fooker 3y ago
Apple is going to do the second one if there’s enough of a market for running GPUs locally. Gaming clearly isn’t, for Apple. But running LLMs might be, time will tell if running them locally is going to become commonplace.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Apple is focused on gaming, however only in what concerns their mobile devices, and for that, the current hardware is good enough for cross-device development.
  - sdflhasjd 3y ago
    Apple is only focused on mobile gaming because they get 30% the money that goes with them.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Google, Steam, Unreal,...

ManuelKiessling 3y ago

The saying goes that you need a third, stupidly expensive bottle of wine next to the cheap and the moderately expensive bottles of wine, if you want to boost sales of the moderately expensive bottle of wine.

AdamN 3y ago
Same thing for menu design. That $150 seafood tower??? That's just there to make the $47 steak ($5 extra for the au poivre sauce and $7 more for the creamed spinach) look like a deal. Sometimes people order the tower but it's just once or twice a night.
pavlov 3y ago
This may be the central reason why the Mac Pro still exists. Ever since Jobs returned in 1997, Apple's Mac lineup has been designed around the idea of a ternary choice of "Good / Better / Best". They used to call the Power Mac configurations explicitly that. I suppose putting the Mac Studio guts inside a Mac Pro case wasn't a big design change, as long as they have the Pro manufacturing line still open. By shipping this lackluster design, they can wringe out a bit more revenue from the investment made in the Mac Pro tooling.
elzbardico 3y ago
This applies even to car manufacturers. I seriously doubt the S-65 AMG from Mercedes sells in sufficient volumes to justify its existence on itself. But from a holistic brand perspective, Mercedes-Benz would be crazy to kill it.
- greedo 3y ago
  Halo car paradigm. John Siracusa has touched on this for the Mac Pro: https://hypercritical.co/2013/03/08/the-case-for-a-true-mac-pro-successor https://hypercritical.co/2013/03/08/the-case-for-a-true-mac-... Sad that other than in price, Apple has really just given up on this.

al_be_back 3y ago

>> This isn’t just for pros, Apple seems to claim; it’s for capital-P Pros. paying $15K for a Mac Pro (without screen) to be tethered to a desk isn't a very creative solution in 2023, WFH / remote working requires agility. MacBook Pros are very powerful already. Plus, consumers are going to want more Energy Efficient / Green products, and that means long-lasting too (reduce waste).

AdamN 3y ago
Tethered to a desk is useful though for fixed assets where there are multiple users on the device (post-production studio, etc...).
- al_be_back 3y ago
  I agree. demand for richer media Content is only going to grow, wouldn't be surprised if post-prod and the like didn't become the sole focus of Mac Pro over the next few years.
tsmarsh 3y ago
I really enjoy the luxury of both. I have a MacBook Air that I use when I'm traveling or sick of being at the desk, but 80% of my computing is done at my desk with my Mac Studio. git, icloud, airplay and basically all corporate work happening in office360 means that I'm not really tethered to any one machine. Why have the desktop? Power. M1 Ultra is a beast, throwing a little more money at a device that isn't going to die because the battery expired or I crack the screen made sense to me. I'm also mostly at my desk, mostly for ergonomic reasons: I hurt _less_ if I'm in a good chair where everything is tuned to my height.
- al_be_back 3y ago
  Oh dear, don't tell me about the cracked screen - damaged two in 3 years :( I like the energy efficiency of apple silicon chips, I think they've hit jackpot with that. True, you get raw power from a high-end desktop/workstation, but cloud services have eaten-up missive chunks of of dev work. MacBook is a good medium (Jack of all trades)

avidphantasm 3y ago

I think the lack of expandable memory is worse than lack of support for dGPUs. Everyone doing technical work (e.g. scientific computing and audio/video and VFX) could use more memory, but not everyone cares about GPU performance. They need to figure out the expandable memory piece first. This would instantly open up the scientific computing market to the new Mac Pro.

pjmlp 3y ago

Yeah, in anything related to GPU power, Apple has lost the market, it is either Windows or GNU/Linux at this point, depending on which set of tools the companies are using. That was always a reason why I only use Macs at the employer and not privately, the price tag for a gamer setup. It is cheaper to get a graphics workstation laptop than one of these models, let alone a desktop model with a nice set of cards connected in SLI mode.

LeoNatan25 3y ago

Actually, the Mac Pro’s biggest problem is the iPhone. Or rather, Apple’s one-trick-pony design of their quote unquote "desktop class" SoC to be just the iPhone SoC, but a little bigger, with the only scale options being multiples of the same chip, with everything soldered on the SoC, and then some thickheadedness on “we didn’t design the architecture with external GPUs in mind”. Apple is already getting beaten by performance-oriented traditional CPU systems, and soon, other vendors will optimize for battery life as well. And Apple will still be stuck with an iPhone chip in all their computers. But that’s OK, because it seems they are pushing their desktop OS in the direction of a phone OS too, both in capability and lockdown, so it might all be good.

sgt 3y ago
Having just upgraded from Mojave to Ventura, I don't really see that they're heavily pushing the desktop OS in the direction of a phone OS. This is still the most powerful Unix desktop system out there, and there's nothing keeping "power users" (in lack of a better term) from treating it as such. They've been talking about this for years though, and I think with people like Craig Federighi in place, there's no real danger of further lock downs.
- LeoNatan25 3y ago
  Just take a look at the security hardening at disk level, war on kernel extensions, continued reliance on entitlements for basic functionality (that is not just limited to sandboxed processes). Coupled with bootargs (like amfi_get_out_of_my_way) being broken for multiple OS versions, and it leads me to a pretty clear conclusion.
  - sgt 3y ago
    Yeah you are right in that there has been hardening for security. But little affects your typical power user. One could also consider eBPF as "war on kernel extensions" on Linux. I honestly think there should be an eBPF port to macOS.

gizajob 3y ago

"Exactly who these pros are and why the Mac Pro is the perfect device for them remains somewhat unclear to me, even after testing the new machine for a few days and speaking to various professionals that Apple is ostensibly targeting." Yeah, because you're not one of them. Anyone that needs to run specialist PCI cards, and there are many people out there particularly in video capture (not just GPUs) will need to spend the money on this machine. And as for the oodles of power, high definition video will find a way to use it. We could have stopped at 4K but the quality and resolution chase isn't ever going to end because it tracks Moore's Law. Try being an artist using ultra-high def video for example, and try maxing out the machine for 6-12 months to see if you can get anything maximally creative out of it. Testing for a couple of days just means you're only using it for the basic journalistic stuff you're doing on every other Mac. Just because you can't think of your use case for something, doesn't mean that nobody has a use for it. Finally, if you're producing hundreds of thousands of dollars of value per year, then the ten grand cost of one of these machines is just a tax write-off. It's not designed as some competist's toy at that price, same with the phenomenally expensive display. Apple taxing money off the tax man.

madeofpalk 3y ago
Are you one of them? The conceit of the article is that the author isnt a "pro" (whatever that means), so they went out and talked to a bunch of people in different industries, and no one had a use for the Mac Pro. > tax write-off Ahh, they just write it off!
- gizajob 3y ago
  Tax loss. It’s not complex - capital expenditure is taken off the tax bill, so there’s people for whom these machines are phenomenally expensive and there’s people for whom they’re just a cost of doing business they’d be paying anyway. Apple know what they’re doing producing them. Author talked to a handful of people, none of whom are using PCI cards or complex workflow. Even when he talks to the video editor who is using a MacBook for editing, he doesn’t consider that video has to be ingressed in a professional way, he’s just editing it. There are a bunch of use cases for this Mac Pro, and the author has committed a fallacy in saying “there are no use cases for the Mac Pro” just because he didn’t find anyone who needed one. Yeah people can use Linux and windows workstations, sure. It would be trivial for Apple to abandon that sector of the market and stick to devices. I’m pretty sure that once the Apple Vision headset comes out, and perhaps a generation or two down the line with wholly-Apple chipsets, certain people will be clamouring for Mac Pros again (i.e. - stereo feeds from phenomenally high definition video cameras to provide content real-time…). But by all means stick with your shade throwing and sarcasm, what do I know, I just have 25 years experience in the industry.

shortformblog 3y ago

I did a piece about four years ago where I tried to determine who was still willing to buy the trash can, new, in 2019, and found that the answer was (essentially) MacStadium.[1] This piece, while quite good, doesn’t dive into this, but I am curious whether MacStadium has plans to do anything with the Mac Pros that they wouldn’t with the Studios. $3,000 for access to slots that you can get on a $500 desktop seems like an upcharge designed to discourage people from buying it. [1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/pajmk9/who-kept-buying-the-mac-pro-everyone-hated https://www.vice.com/en/article/pajmk9/who-kept-buying-the-m...

lapcat 3y ago

2012 Intel Mac Pro: 1) Expandable RAM 2) Trivially replaceable internal storage 3) Affordable to software developers 2023 Apple silicon Mac Pro: None of the above Craig Federighi in 2017: “I think if you use Xcode downloads as a metric, it’s possible software developers are actually our largest pro audience. It’s growing very quickly, it’s been fantastic.” https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives I personally had a 2010 Mac Pro, and it was fantastic. But since then, Apple never again produced a Mac Pro that I wanted to or could buy. Going from $2500 base price in 2012 to $7000 in 2023 is absurd. If you compare Apple's other Macs, for example the iMac had a base price of $1300 in 2012, and in 2023 it's... $1300.

bpicolo 3y ago
Probably their largest audience on account of the disposable income

hstaab 3y ago

I think it’s a matter of lifestyle choices as well when comparing to the studio. A lot of us work on our computers for a good portion of the day, why not have the $3000 upgrade that looks way cooler? People make these upgrades in trim options on their cars all the time.

uni_baconcat 3y ago

Although it has not happened yet, I wonder what will happen to Apple Silicon Macs if the newly released macOS drops support. It is not like Macs with Intel chips, which can easily install an alternative operating system.

kitsunesoba 3y ago
Apple went out of their way to add the ability to boot third party operating systems to M-series macs, which the Asahi Linux team has been using to build a Linux distro tailored to M-series Macs. Asahi Linux is still a work in progress but shockingly usable for its age, and will no doubt be ready to roll by the time the first M-series macs have their support dropped. I’ve read that OpenBSD is bootable on M-series macs too, so that may also be an option. Additionally, while I don’t think Microsoft will ever take the invitation, Apple has publicly stated they’d welcome an Apple Silicon port of Windows.

greedo 3y ago

I've owned every Mac Pro with the exception of the 2019. I bought them because I wanted to be able to easily expand RAM and storage without having to use external enclosures. Apple doesn't seem able or willing to allow this anymore on their systems since everything is either part of the SoC, or hardwired to the system board. The new Mac Pro does allow you to add either NVME chips (at an incredible cost) or NVME cards in the PCI slots. So as soon as the new Mac Pro was announced at WWDC, I did a quick check on the diff between it and the Mac Studio and instantly bought the Studio. I've had it for 2 weeks and it's been fantastic. Although I loved the old flexibility, part of that's gone, and part of it is just not worth the price Apple wants. And Apple has just pushed this price way above the value. Now that the performance is the same, they've limited the market dramatically.