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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

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.
- detourdog 3y ago
  I think that is enough. Sometimes I want everything in one box. To be able to spec a computer with the expansion peripherals on the inside is very convenient.
  - prox 3y ago
    Especially for media studios with lots of data to digest. They eat all of these PCI slots up probably. They probably gonna kit whole studios out with these things.
    - pavlov 3y ago
      The author of this Verge article had the same assumption, but couldn't find anyone in the VFX or video production business who uses Mac Pros like this. The reasons given by the studio people interviewed make sense. They get a lot more graphics bang for the buck with Nvidia-equipped PCs, and they can upgrade piecemeal. Additionally for video pros, they were burned by Apple's consumer-oriented FCP X product overhaul over a decade ago and the mistrust still lingers: 'And while Apple’s decision to overhaul Final Cut Pro was over a decade ago, studios still haven’t forgotten. Almost all of the video professionals I spoke to brought it up. “Every filmmaker in the world was using this,” Lebensfeld complained. “And they lost that whole market. They just don’t take it seriously.” '“They really did screw us over on that,” Ford, the documentarian, agreed. “I was really upset.” 'I searched high and low and ended up connecting with over 20 professionals for this story in order to locate someone who enthusiastically wanted to buy the Mac Pro. I found exactly one: Drofa. He loves the cheese-grater design. '“The killer feature is when somebody comes and says, ‘Okay, you have a Mac Pro,’ and I say, ‘Yeah, I can make a cheesesteak,’” he explained.'
aurareturn 3y ago
The Mac Pro is actually very competitive against similar $7,000 - $10,000 workstations; especially if you need a lot of high bandwidth memory. However, it's not competitive with workstations that are above that because you'll quickly approach workstations that have Epyc and professional Nvidia cards. We'll need to wait for an Mx "Extreme" SoC, if Apple ever makes one, to compete above the $7,000 price point.
- mort96 3y ago
  I feel like I'd have a very hard time designing a $7000 system which doesn't completely blow the Mac Pro out of the water in terms of CPU and GPU performance. Do you have some examples of $7000 systems which are beaten by the $7000 Mac Pro's cut-down M2 Ultra in terms of CPU or GPU power? EDIT: I don't get why this is getting downvoted. The M2 Ultra really doesn't have very impressive GPU power compared to even consumer offerings from nvidia and AMD. The competitive $7000 workstations would have to have something weaker than a 4080.
  - junofan 3y ago
    RTX 6000 Ada alone is $7000. Don’t see how you’re “completely blowing the Mac Pro out of the water” at that price point.
    - mort96 3y ago
      The 4090, which seems like it's blowing the M2 Ultra out of the water, is $1600 though.
      - junofan 3y ago
        Great for Cyberpunk 2077, but not great if you need more than 24 GiB.
        greedo 3y ago
        Considering the RTX 6000 ADA is like $8k, you could add three 4090s for half the cost.
samwillis 3y ago
The thing is, the trash can Mac Pro kinda fits the market segment the Mac Studio is now in. If Apple had created the "Studio" range back then for it, rather than suggest it was the successor of the Pro, it would have been better received. Apple don't tend to make the same mistake twice, this time they created the new marketing category for that product. 99% of people who would have been in the "Pro" category are happy getting a "Studio", plus a bunch upgrading from an iMac. The Studio is the new Pro to them, it's just for marketing they needed to change the name and have a "continuation line" for the old product. As you said it's here for the long haul but mostly has a legacy range.
- davewritescode 3y ago
  This is exactly me. I have a 2017 27' iMac that's really starting to feel sluggish. I've been holding out for a new iMac but I have a new Studio on the way in a couple of weeks.
jbverschoor 3y ago
Apple and others could just as well create an accelerator card with a bunch of M2s on it. They could also create some sort of blade server.. they print their own cups in literally everything. Phone, laptops, headset, apple cinema displays. The production cost of an M1 is about $30. Remember that the 5-year $1.5B contact with AWS will expire next year. They already have XCode cloud, and have enabled virtualization natively for a while Either large Mac Pro based rack-servers or accelerators for rendering, transcoding, and AI/ML. They could market those 10x$30 chips on a single board as something that is "10x" the power of the Mac Pro, at “only” $20000 a pop. You can be very certain that NVDA did not get unnoticed, as Apple has the same capabilities, and sees a future in AI/ML.
- WastingMyTime89 3y ago
  I'm not oracle so I can't say if you are wrong but wouldn't that be a significant investment to go compete in a market where margins are not that great while risking to dilute their brand?
  - jbverschoor 3y ago
    First step would be to run their own hardware. Why? $1.5B is a substantial amount of money. They can claim to be more green/energy efficient. As for a public cloud, maybe not yet.. the problem with it is that it can be difficult to change/unwind. However, they might just want to sell those sweet high margin AI/ML cycles running on both the backend and the client devices
- tempest_ 3y ago
  Apple is not going to enter the commodity server business, that is just a race to the bottom and probably the reason they got out of it in the first place. The only reason XCode Cloud (or XCode at all) exists is because people need it to develop for ios, if developers could choose anything else they would. At this point they are a luxury consumer product company, that is where the margins are that have made them successful for the last 10 years.
mort96 3y ago
> [Apple] doesn't have a chip with a tonne of transceivers on it that it can use to hook up a massive GPU What do you mean? It has an x16 PCIe 4 slot, that's more than enough for any video card.
- efxhoy 3y ago
  You can’t run video cards in the new Mac Pro. https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/11/apple-exec-discusses-mac-pro-lack-of-egpu-support/ https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/11/apple-exec-discusses-ma...
  - mort96 3y ago
    I know. I'm saying the problem isn't a lack of PCI bandwidth or anything like that as my parent comment suggested.
  - davrosthedalek 3y ago
    Is that a hardware limitation, or just the lack of willingness to provide software support? I can't really imagine the former.
    - greedo 3y ago
      Apple has said that it isn't a direction they've wanted to pursue.
cstross 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. There's another thing Apple do with bad products, though. The original 13" Aluminum Macbook launched in November 2008. It was discontinued in June 2009, in favour of the 13" Macbook Pro, which offered a permanently built-in battery (the previous model had a removable battery), and dropped Firewire. That stayed on sale, subject to regular spec bumps, until October 2012, when they bumped the screen to a retina display ... I'm not an insider, just a long-term Apple watcher (been using Macs since 1991): what seems to happen is they used to get an internal goal to fill a niche in the product range by a certain date, and if the performance target isn't quite achievable they ship whatever they've got -- then iterate on it, possibly with a model branding change. The Mac Pro looks like a classic case of this: Tim Cook committed Apple to being 100% Apple Silicon across the range by the end of 2022, they missed, but they had to ship something to keep the Mac Pro brand alive. So they shipped a turkey (a Mac Studio with PCI slots and a higher price tag). What happens next is: either they ship the real Apple Silicon Mac Pro in a year or two (with who-knows-what changes, but something to differentiate it from the top of the Mac Studio range other than price), or they admit defeat and kill the Pro range altogether, or maybe downgrade it to be the name of the top end Mac Studio. But this model won't be available for more than two years, max.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  What was bad about the 13" Aluminum Macbook? It was weirdly named, but I don't know what was "Mac Pro" levels of bad about it?
- jwx48 3y ago
  My 2009 Macbook Pro 13 (5,5) had firewire. Could you be referring to a different model?
  - cstross 3y ago
    Just checked on MacTracker -- yes, the 5,5 Pro had firewire; it's immediate predecessor was the Macbook (no pro) 5,1, which didn't have FW but had the removable battery -- the 5,5 added Firewire.
jasoneckert 3y ago
The "trashcan" Mac Pro (late 2013) was my favourite Mac of all time - it actually fit my professional needs perfectly, and performed incredibly well in a small package for a reasonable price (I couldn't spec out a comparable Xeon system at the time that was cheaper). I don't think it could be considered a failure by any means. It was a sweet spot when it came to price/performance for many of us in tech/science industries, and perhaps that was the reason it wasn't replaced for a long time.

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.

detourdog 3y ago
I think that is enough. Sometimes I want everything in one box. To be able to spec a computer with the expansion peripherals on the inside is very convenient.
- prox 3y ago
  Especially for media studios with lots of data to digest. They eat all of these PCI slots up probably. They probably gonna kit whole studios out with these things.
  - pavlov 3y ago
    The author of this Verge article had the same assumption, but couldn't find anyone in the VFX or video production business who uses Mac Pros like this. The reasons given by the studio people interviewed make sense. They get a lot more graphics bang for the buck with Nvidia-equipped PCs, and they can upgrade piecemeal. Additionally for video pros, they were burned by Apple's consumer-oriented FCP X product overhaul over a decade ago and the mistrust still lingers: 'And while Apple’s decision to overhaul Final Cut Pro was over a decade ago, studios still haven’t forgotten. Almost all of the video professionals I spoke to brought it up. “Every filmmaker in the world was using this,” Lebensfeld complained. “And they lost that whole market. They just don’t take it seriously.” '“They really did screw us over on that,” Ford, the documentarian, agreed. “I was really upset.” 'I searched high and low and ended up connecting with over 20 professionals for this story in order to locate someone who enthusiastically wanted to buy the Mac Pro. I found exactly one: Drofa. He loves the cheese-grater design. '“The killer feature is when somebody comes and says, ‘Okay, you have a Mac Pro,’ and I say, ‘Yeah, I can make a cheesesteak,’” he explained.'

aurareturn 3y ago

The Mac Pro is actually very competitive against similar $7,000 - $10,000 workstations; especially if you need a lot of high bandwidth memory. However, it's not competitive with workstations that are above that because you'll quickly approach workstations that have Epyc and professional Nvidia cards. We'll need to wait for an Mx "Extreme" SoC, if Apple ever makes one, to compete above the $7,000 price point.

mort96 3y ago
I feel like I'd have a very hard time designing a $7000 system which doesn't completely blow the Mac Pro out of the water in terms of CPU and GPU performance. Do you have some examples of $7000 systems which are beaten by the $7000 Mac Pro's cut-down M2 Ultra in terms of CPU or GPU power? EDIT: I don't get why this is getting downvoted. The M2 Ultra really doesn't have very impressive GPU power compared to even consumer offerings from nvidia and AMD. The competitive $7000 workstations would have to have something weaker than a 4080.
- junofan 3y ago
  RTX 6000 Ada alone is $7000. Don’t see how you’re “completely blowing the Mac Pro out of the water” at that price point.
  - mort96 3y ago
    The 4090, which seems like it's blowing the M2 Ultra out of the water, is $1600 though.
    - junofan 3y ago
      Great for Cyberpunk 2077, but not great if you need more than 24 GiB.
      - greedo 3y ago
        Considering the RTX 6000 ADA is like $8k, you could add three 4090s for half the cost.

samwillis 3y ago

The thing is, the trash can Mac Pro kinda fits the market segment the Mac Studio is now in. If Apple had created the "Studio" range back then for it, rather than suggest it was the successor of the Pro, it would have been better received. Apple don't tend to make the same mistake twice, this time they created the new marketing category for that product. 99% of people who would have been in the "Pro" category are happy getting a "Studio", plus a bunch upgrading from an iMac. The Studio is the new Pro to them, it's just for marketing they needed to change the name and have a "continuation line" for the old product. As you said it's here for the long haul but mostly has a legacy range.

davewritescode 3y ago
This is exactly me. I have a 2017 27' iMac that's really starting to feel sluggish. I've been holding out for a new iMac but I have a new Studio on the way in a couple of weeks.

jbverschoor 3y ago

Apple and others could just as well create an accelerator card with a bunch of M2s on it. They could also create some sort of blade server.. they print their own cups in literally everything. Phone, laptops, headset, apple cinema displays. The production cost of an M1 is about $30. Remember that the 5-year $1.5B contact with AWS will expire next year. They already have XCode cloud, and have enabled virtualization natively for a while Either large Mac Pro based rack-servers or accelerators for rendering, transcoding, and AI/ML. They could market those 10x$30 chips on a single board as something that is "10x" the power of the Mac Pro, at “only” $20000 a pop. You can be very certain that NVDA did not get unnoticed, as Apple has the same capabilities, and sees a future in AI/ML.

WastingMyTime89 3y ago
I'm not oracle so I can't say if you are wrong but wouldn't that be a significant investment to go compete in a market where margins are not that great while risking to dilute their brand?
- jbverschoor 3y ago
  First step would be to run their own hardware. Why? $1.5B is a substantial amount of money. They can claim to be more green/energy efficient. As for a public cloud, maybe not yet.. the problem with it is that it can be difficult to change/unwind. However, they might just want to sell those sweet high margin AI/ML cycles running on both the backend and the client devices
tempest_ 3y ago
Apple is not going to enter the commodity server business, that is just a race to the bottom and probably the reason they got out of it in the first place. The only reason XCode Cloud (or XCode at all) exists is because people need it to develop for ios, if developers could choose anything else they would. At this point they are a luxury consumer product company, that is where the margins are that have made them successful for the last 10 years.

mort96 3y ago

> [Apple] doesn't have a chip with a tonne of transceivers on it that it can use to hook up a massive GPU What do you mean? It has an x16 PCIe 4 slot, that's more than enough for any video card.

efxhoy 3y ago
You can’t run video cards in the new Mac Pro. https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/11/apple-exec-discusses-mac-pro-lack-of-egpu-support/ https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/11/apple-exec-discusses-ma...
- mort96 3y ago
  I know. I'm saying the problem isn't a lack of PCI bandwidth or anything like that as my parent comment suggested.
- davrosthedalek 3y ago
  Is that a hardware limitation, or just the lack of willingness to provide software support? I can't really imagine the former.
  - greedo 3y ago
    Apple has said that it isn't a direction they've wanted to pursue.

cstross 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. There's another thing Apple do with bad products, though. The original 13" Aluminum Macbook launched in November 2008. It was discontinued in June 2009, in favour of the 13" Macbook Pro, which offered a permanently built-in battery (the previous model had a removable battery), and dropped Firewire. That stayed on sale, subject to regular spec bumps, until October 2012, when they bumped the screen to a retina display ... I'm not an insider, just a long-term Apple watcher (been using Macs since 1991): what seems to happen is they used to get an internal goal to fill a niche in the product range by a certain date, and if the performance target isn't quite achievable they ship whatever they've got -- then iterate on it, possibly with a model branding change. The Mac Pro looks like a classic case of this: Tim Cook committed Apple to being 100% Apple Silicon across the range by the end of 2022, they missed, but they had to ship something to keep the Mac Pro brand alive. So they shipped a turkey (a Mac Studio with PCI slots and a higher price tag). What happens next is: either they ship the real Apple Silicon Mac Pro in a year or two (with who-knows-what changes, but something to differentiate it from the top of the Mac Studio range other than price), or they admit defeat and kill the Pro range altogether, or maybe downgrade it to be the name of the top end Mac Studio. But this model won't be available for more than two years, max.

madeofpalk 3y ago
What was bad about the 13" Aluminum Macbook? It was weirdly named, but I don't know what was "Mac Pro" levels of bad about it?
jwx48 3y ago
My 2009 Macbook Pro 13 (5,5) had firewire. Could you be referring to a different model?
- cstross 3y ago
  Just checked on MacTracker -- yes, the 5,5 Pro had firewire; it's immediate predecessor was the Macbook (no pro) 5,1, which didn't have FW but had the removable battery -- the 5,5 added Firewire.

jasoneckert 3y ago

The "trashcan" Mac Pro (late 2013) was my favourite Mac of all time - it actually fit my professional needs perfectly, and performed incredibly well in a small package for a reasonable price (I couldn't spec out a comparable Xeon system at the time that was cheaper). I don't think it could be considered a failure by any means. It was a sweet spot when it came to price/performance for many of us in tech/science industries, and perhaps that was the reason it wasn't replaced for a long time.