13-Inch MacBook Pro With M2 Chip Outperforms Base Model Mac Pro Despite Costing Nearly $5,000 Less

[Freeangel1]

LOL. funny

 

[Gasu E.]

I would pay $100 for a 28-core Mac Pro with at least 256 GB of ram. I'll deal with the lower performance.

For $100, you should expect more like 1 1-core Mac Pro with 256 MB of RAM. And supply your own case.

 

[jav6454]

I'm wondering why Apple hasn't introduced Fusion RAM for the M-series. All your currently active processes in on-chip RAM and everything else offloaded to slower upgradable RAM.

Fusion drives came about as to try to boost main storage speeds and also give users storage space at a time when a pure SSD solution was too expensive for the space required.

With RAM memory, speeds are not a bottleneck, it is just DRAM densities. What you are referencing is the L1, L2, L3 cache is you can increase at the cost of power requirements.

 

[blackquartz]

I came to the comment section for a good laugh, you guys never disappoint.

 

[seek3r]

Well I mean Apple charges $2000 for an afterburner card for the Meme Pro, when for the same price you can get a base spec 14 inch M1 Pro MBP that has a media engine that does the same job as the afterburner card. And the same media engine in that laptop (while on battery power mind you) exports miles faster than the afterburner card does, effectively turning it into retroware after the span of two years.

So yeah, the Meme Pro is a joke lmao. There's no reason to buy it anymore when the Mac Studio at 1/3 the cost outperforms it in every conceivable way. This is why there's so much hype for the Apple Silicon Mac Pro, so this overpriced joke can finally be gone.

I think you may be taking the MP's current spec and pricing a little too personally.... it's clearly not targetted at you, and of course it's also clearly aging rapidly, but when it was released for its price (wheels aside, which was silly but that kind of silliness isn't exclusive to Apple on that kind of workstation) it was a solid machine for its target market.

Re: price btw I have serious doubts that we'll see an AS mac pro at any point significantly below the price point of the current one, the studio is filling the "prosumer" slot now, the mac pro is almost certainly going to remain firmly targetted at the my-employer-is-paying-for-my-new-high-end-workstation-because-on-a-corp-side-the-cost-is-somewhat-irrelevant-compared-to-employment-cost-and-productivity market

 

[Spaceboi Scaphandre]

What is that reason supposed to be?

I call it the Meme Pro because everything about it is a meme, and has generated so many memes making fun of it. Some examples are:

• The absurd base spec price
• Cheese grater design leading to so many cheese jokes
• The $700 wheels
• The $2000 Afterburner Card that became retroware the moment the M1 Pro showed up
• The price for upgrading
• The price of the Pro Display XDR that was shown off with it
• The $1000 monitor stand for the Pro Display XDR
• The fact the moment Apple Silicon showed up the entire package was becoming even more hilarious

I can go on. This computer was a short term solution to the mistake of the 2013 trash can and it shows by just how much the Apple Silicon Macs are upstaging it in value and real world performance. The Mac Studio only added more fuel to the fire at how redundant this thing this.

Unless for some reason you need over 512gb of RAM, there is absolutely no reason at all to buy this as a professional over the Mac Studio. The sooner we get the Apple Silicon Mac Pro, the better

 

[jav6454]

I call it the Meme Pro because everything about it is a meme, and has generated so many memes making fun of it. Some examples are:

• The absurd base spec price
• Cheese grater design leading to so many cheese jokes
• The $700 wheels
• The $2000 Afterburner Card that became retroware the moment the M1 Pro showed up
• The price for upgrading
• The price of the Pro Display XDR that was shown off with it
• The $1000 monitor stand for the Pro Display XDR
• The fact the moment Apple Silicon showed up the entire package was becoming even more hilarious

I can go on. This computer was a short term solution to the mistake of the 2013 trash can and it shows by just how much the Apple Silicon Macs are upstaging it in value and real world performance. The Mac Studio only added more fuel to the fire at how redundant this thing this.

Unless for some reason you need over 512gb of RAM, there is absolutely no reason at all to buy this as a professional over the Mac Studio. The sooner we get the Apple Silicon Mac Pro, the better

I can agree with all except the upgrade costs. The Mac Pro uses Intel Xeon CPUs with ECC memory. Those are usually marked up quite heavily which is passed down to the consumer.

As of right now, the Mac Pro is a joke in terms of computational power.

 

[Onelifenofear]

The mistake people make is comparing to Xeon workstations without understanding whether a Xeon workstation even provides any benefit. CAD, Scientific Measurement, Engineering, and Modelling are all workloads that benefit from running a Xeon and ECC memory because those are workloads that require dead-on accuracy in memory. Photo Editing, Recording and Audio Engineering, Animation, Video Editing - none of those workflows benefit a whole heck of a lot from either a Xeon or ECC memory. For those workloads, Xeons offer a small benefit in memory cache, but little else (ECC memory offers next to nothing).

The only reason Apple went with Xeons is because profit margins could be pushed much higher with Xeons, and users would only be able to compare to other Xeon workstations (just as you're doing now) without being able to compare the actual performance for their own given workloads.

As a side-note, had Apple gone with AMD Ryzen processors, they would still have been able to offer ECC memory. Despite Ryzen an Epic outperforming Xeon for nearly a decade, Apple still insisted on sticking with Intel.

Or they are capable have a lot more cores than Pentium. AMDs chips are awesome but basically heat syncs their power per watt are insane.

 

[Bustycat]

Well it has - they have had a number of GPU upgrades. The CPU for them is less of an issue - the replacement newer Xeons are barely any faster. Such is the problem with intel chips.

Multi-Core Score of W-3375 is about 26000, comparing to 18000 from W-3275M. Apple just doesn’t want to upgrade Mac Pro without its own SoC.

 

[usersince86]

This is normal evolution. Tick/Tock. The slowest and cheapest MacBook made today runs circles around the top tier fastest MacPro of yesteryear.

Then the new MacPro will come out and become the current trophy holder - only to be supplanted in the future by the next laptop.

This leap frog cycle of laptop and Mac Pro has been going on for decades.

But typically a MBP doesn't beat a MacPro sold at the same time for 5 times more plus...

 

[hagjohn]

Geekbench is a short benchmark. What about for long projects? I would imagine you would have heat buildup in a laptop that a tower would not have and that would degrade the performance of the laptop.

 

[calstanford]

How does the M2 compare to the M1 Pro is the real question. Anyone got numbers?

 

[AppleFan1998]

Nice… finally getting to the point we will have little supercomputers in our hands.

 

[michaelprescott]

That is amazing. Sounds to me like a testament to just how innovative and superior Apple is at chip design. I wonder what they have in store for the next Mac Pros.

Are these new M2 chips the same ones that are going into the VR headsets?

 

[The Cappy]

why spend 5000 more when you can get the m2 MacBook Pro? apple has some serious marketing problems that needs to be worked on.

Because up until now there wasn't an M2 computer of any kind?

 

[tubuliferous]

This is normal evolution. Tick/Tock. The slowest and cheapest MacBook made today runs circles around the top tier fastest MacPro of yesteryear.

Then the new MacPro will come out and become the current trophy holder - only to be supplanted in the future by the next laptop.

This leap frog cycle of laptop and Mac Pro has been going on for decades.

Yeah, good point, though what makes the comparison particularly striking is that the referenced Mac Pro is still being sold at what now seems to be an exorbitant cost.

 

[Kuckuckstein]

This is normal evolution. Tick/Tock. The slowest and cheapest MacBook made today runs circles around the top tier fastest MacPro of yesteryear.

Then the new MacPro will come out and become the current trophy holder - only to be supplanted in the future by the next laptop.

This leap frog cycle of laptop and Mac Pro has been going on for decades.

Yes but in this case it is due to two things: Apple silicon inside the laptop, and Apple’s overpricing of standard components in otherwise user configurable machines like the Mac Pro (RAM, graphic cards…)

Because my 2018 MacBook Air runs far behind my 2010 stationary windows PC. Simply because I was able to give it some speedy SSD and more memory at an affordable price.

 

[assb10yr]

There's a reason I call it the Meme Pro. What an overpriced joke of a computer.

At this point Apple should just pull it from sale even though we're a few months from the Apple Silicon Mac Pro. There's literally no point in owning one anymore outside of you just absolutely hate having money since Macs that are 1/3 of the base spec price outperform it in every imaginable way.

You sound like someone who has a difficult time paying their utility bills.

 

[erikkfi]

They’re letting the Intel Mac Pro stagnate as long as possible so the inevitable performance comparison with Apple Silicon is just that much more favorable. It’s like baking the numbers in advance.

 

[JosephAW]

Can’t wait to buy a Intel Mac Pro in a few years for $100
The Mac Pro 5,1 are around that now.

 

[R!TTER]

AMDs chips are awesome but basically heat syncs their power per watt are insane.

What are you talking about? AMD has had class leading perf/W since at least 2019 if not a little earlier

 

[Spaceboi Scaphandre]

I can agree with all except the upgrade costs. The Mac Pro uses Intel Xeon CPUs with ECC memory. Those are usually marked up quite heavily which is passed down to the consumer.

As of right now, the Mac Pro is a joke in terms of computational power.

The amount Apple charges for RAM upgrades on the Meme Pro are absurd that professionals just buy their own RAM and slot them in instead.

 

[jav6454]

The amount Apple charges for RAM upgrades on the Meme Pro are absurd that professionals just buy their own RAM and slot them in instead.

One can easily buy in NewEgg to be honest, all it saves is the hassle.

 

[Moonlight]

I call it the Meme Pro because everything about it is a meme, and has generated so many memes making fun of it. Some examples are:

• The absurd base spec price
• Cheese grater design leading to so many cheese jokes
• The $700 wheels
• The $2000 Afterburner Card that became retroware the moment the M1 Pro showed up
• The price for upgrading
• The price of the Pro Display XDR that was shown off with it
• The $1000 monitor stand for the Pro Display XDR
• The fact the moment Apple Silicon showed up the entire package was becoming even more hilarious

I can go on. This computer was a short term solution to the mistake of the 2013 trash can and it shows by just how much the Apple Silicon Macs are upstaging it in value and real world performance. The Mac Studio only added more fuel to the fire at how redundant this thing this.

Unless for some reason you need over 512gb of RAM, there is absolutely no reason at all to buy this as a professional over the Mac Studio. The sooner we get the Apple Silicon Mac Pro, the better

You don't seem to understand the true high end pro market

 

[Spaceboi Scaphandre]

One can easily buy in NewEgg to be honest, all it saves is the hassle.

Thats....literally what I said. Did you not read my post?