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

[CarlJ]

Just remember what Bill Gates is famous for saying... "640K ought to be enough for anybody". So, never put a ceiling on memory use or need. The future is ALWAYS calling.

However, I'm sure if everyone coded in Assembly Language (like back in the 80's)... RAM requirements and processor requirements would be a lot lower. I mean, realistically, how much space RAM/disk SHOULD macOS Monterey take up, if coded in 100% pure Assembly Language? What generation of processor could macOS Monterey run on, if coded that way?

Speaking as a survivor of the 80's (you thought we were all gone, didn't you), "everyone" didn't write in assembly language, only some of us. We really did have other languages then - C, Pascal, Fortran, Lisp, Cobol, Basic, tons of others. No Python or Perl quite yet, but lots of Awk and Sed and Yacc and Lex and shell scripting.

Writing in assembly can get you some space savings over C, but not as much as you think - C is basically a generic high-level assembler (and it's still the language that most operating systems are written in). What makes something like Monterey big is not the choice of C over assembly, but rather... just how damn complicated it is. It's doing so many things. Oh, and if we were writing OS's in assembler these days, we'd be at least a decade behind where we are now in capabilities of the machine. The reason for writing in C rather than assembler, is that little extra bit of abstraction makes it much easier to reason about and write large systems.

 

[peter2]

The new 13-inch MacBook Pro with the M2 chip appears to be faster than a base model Mac Pro in benchmarks, despite costing nearly $5,000 less.

Yeah, sure... do those benchmarks include a task in need of more that 24 GB of RAM? How about 1.5 TB of RAM?
Secondly, comparing an Intel CPU from Q2'19 (with corresponding bus / RAM speeds) against a 06/2022 Apple CPU sure is fair.

Facepalm / Yawn

 

[Spaceboi Scaphandre]

It wasn't a joke to you guys when it was released a few years ago. When people pointed out how insanely overpriced the thing was, a lot of you here at MacRumors were complaining about the criticism and trying to justify that it's a 'Pro' machine for 'Pro' users.

Actually I only made my MacRumors account a week ago. I've always made fun of the Meme Pro ever since it was revealed lmao

 

[avkills]

One real world use case I would like more focus on is the fact that I've had my Mac Pro rendering 3D or compressing video files and I have still been able to do normal computing tasks with almost zero apparent slow down.

I will never discount how impressive the M1/M2 are; but for actual real continuous grunt work, there isn't a whole lot to go on with the M1/M2s. They just have not been around long enough. BareFeats is probably not going to be a reliable source going forward since Rob passed. 😞

The PCI slots and memory expansion is what the big deal on the Mac Pro is. As has been stated already, there is no way any M variant chip that is currently out is going to outperform a Mac Pro equipped with AMD W6800x or W6900x cards when it comes to GPU tasks.

Apple's new Mac Pro better have slots, upgradeable memory and some sort of way to add external graphics or it is going to be another dead end.

In my perfect world, Apple releases a PCI based GPU that "ALSO" works in the 2019 Mac Pro; and while they are at it, also include all your custom encode/decode bits as well. Basically a AfterBurner like card that has M variant GPU cores and encode/decode. But the chances of this are super slim because Apple does not care about you after you buy in to a product. And anyone who says it can't work, well it has to be able to work, because how else does the AfterBurner card work; the OS somehow knows to offload ProRes decode to that card when installed instead of the GPU and/or CPU.

 

[Phil.O]

Y-yes I can! How dare you imply my Macbook Pro can't grate! I'll show you!

So I guess "Insanely Grate" is still thing . . .

 

[Onelifenofear]

I feel bad for the people who bought the Intel Mac Pro. At the time, that “Mac Pro needing” audience was dying for an upgrade, and did not know about the silicon Mac transition that was coming just a short time later. But, I’m sure those who needed it are making good use of it.

Don’t feel bad I’ve made a lot of cash with mine the last 2 and half years. Thats like an electrician saying nope, I won’t buy that work van, I’ll wait for the new one.

Computers always get faster - you jump in, make cash and upgrade later. What threads like this always forget is that work computer kit is completely tax deductible (in the UK anyway) so you can either buy stuff or give it to the taxman.

And threads always end up having non pros shocked at the prices (wheel aside!) of workstations and saying inane things like “THREADRIPPER!”, which is utterly bizarre in a mac forum.

 

[unchecked]

One real world use case I would like more focus on is the fact that I've had my Mac Pro rendering 3D or compressing video files and I have still been able to do normal computing tasks with almost zero apparent slow down.

I will never discount how impressive the M1/M2 are; but for actual real continuous grunt work, there isn't a whole lot to go on with the M1/M2s. They just have not been around long enough. BareFeats is probably not going to be a reliable source going forward since Rob passed. 😞

The PCI slots and memory expansion is what the big deal on the Mac Pro is. As has been stated already, there is no way any M variant chip that is currently out is going to outperform a Mac Pro equipped with AMD W6800x or W6900x cards when it comes to GPU tasks.

Apple's new Mac Pro better have slots, upgradeable memory and some sort of way to add external graphics or it is going to be another dead end.

In my perfect world, Apple releases a PCI based GPU that "ALSO" works in the 2019 Mac Pro; and while they are at it, also include all your custom encode/decode bits as well. Basically a AfterBurner like card that has M variant GPU cores and encode/decode. But the chances of this are super slim because Apple does not care about you after you buy in to a product. And anyone who says it can't work, well it has to be able to work, because how else does the AfterBurner card work; the OS somehow knows to offload ProRes decode to that card when installed instead of the GPU and/or CPU.

I can feel the continuous grunt work part keenly.

I've been trying to get my M1 Mac Mini to be a streaming machine for a local sport league and we have matches that run for the whole day. It's form factor is a such a big advantage over a normal PC in that I don't have to carry such a big tower in and out every week. But after trying out every weekend for the last couple of months, when I try to add in more camera inputs and do things like instant replays the RAM and CPU pressure are there.

The thing with the M1 is the RAM is being used as both system RAM and VRAM. Sure we have swap, but that also eats into my internal storage quite a bit.

So yep. I'm interested to see how Apple Silicon plays with GPUs and expandable RAM and ultimately how it compares to an appropriately spec'ed PC especially in the price part.

 

[bax2003]

Wow, it outperforms machine with 4+ years old Technology. Bravo for Mac Rumors, what a story !


Just a small reminder, Apple never dropped the prices of the new machines as long as new ones are still sold, so, again, Bravo for Mac Rumors.

 

[wilhoitm]

Is anybody waiting to trade in their 2019 Mac Pro for the M2 Mac Pro? If the price is that much lower are they going to give us 2 M2 Mac Pros?

 

[theluggage]

What Apple delivered instead was a Kenworth, and from then on has said that you can either have the Kenworth or you have to settle for a Corolla, because they aren't building anything in between.

Yup - I think the Mac Studio helps fill the gap in terms of CPU performance but doesn't address the expandability issue.

 

[HaddockW]

Man, lets not get ahead of ourselves. I have a 64GB M1 Max, 32 core GPU. I think it is beastly for what it is but there are some workloads not yet optimized for ARM64 processors. There would be some scenarios where I'd take a XEON tower over any macbook - machine learning, running large scale Docker workloads, and ability to run legacy x64 workloads.

 

[Onelifenofear]

Wut. Man, that Mac Pro looks like a terrible, terrible deal three years later

Not really. Because it’s 3 years later.

Curent Mac Pro can do many things the M1 Studio Ultras and M2 can’t: It’s not all about the CPU.
8 PCIE slots - Pro video and audio breakout cards
Up to 1.5tb ram - not 128gb.
Discreet GPUs with up to 128gb RAM ( not shared )
Upgradable

That said I can’t wait for the Mac Pro - but if it doesn’t have similar subsidiary specs then they have failed - it needs to be upgradable.

 

[Razor_Crest]

is the MBP faster than the MBA?

I would assume so because it has an active cooling system, especially for extended workloads.

 

[mi7chy]

Useless synthetic benchmark. Use real world workloads.

 

[Razor_Crest]

Intel employees are going to cry themselves to sleep tonight.

 

[seek3r]

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.

If you’re buying that particular machine as a professional it’s often getting provisioned by an IT dept and it’s actually cheaper on TCO to just pay Apple’s prices, never have to have one of your techs crack the machine at deploy, and leave everything under one warranty. And for individual buyers sure, upgrade the ram yourself, Apple isnt forcing you to pay their ram prices there

Again, this machine isnt targeted at you, and neither will be its successor

 

[seek3r]

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

I’ve often found that folks who have never worked in a field that needs this kind of workstation for an actual company have no idea how cost works - and how accounting is handled. My boss didnt bat an eye at my new MBP, display, keyboard, camera, etc that I got provisioned with this year. Total purchase was around $5k not including the time for IT to provision or anyone’s time, from mine to my boss to purchasing to.. etc in getting it ordered and to me.

I needed it for work, my time and work costs a lot, our spend on general cloud and on prem computing infra costs a lot, my workstation is a cost rounding error - even at 10x the cost it would still be a budget rounding err. If I had thought I needed a MP and justified it in my ask instead of my MBP that would have been approved no problem too. Our designers have done just that.

 

[theluggage]

However, I'm sure if everyone coded in Assembly Language (like back in the 80's)... RAM requirements and processor requirements would be a lot lower.

To echo @CarlJ - high-level languages go back to 1955 (the precursor to COBOL) - FORTRAN is 1957. C is 1972. The APPLE II came with BASIC. Part of the inspiration behind RISC processors like ARM (1987) was that efficient code was now being generated by optimising compilers, so you didn't need to clutter up the instruction set with convenience features designed to help humans lovingly hand-crafting assembly language.

Anyhoo, people don't generally buy 512GB of RAM today because of lazy people writing code in C or Swift. More likely because they want to hold gigabytes of data in RAM - whether it is bitmaps, sound samples, video or Big Data on what the global population is clicking on in Facebook today.

The size of a full screenshot on an Apple II was probably about 16K.... Screenshot from my current screen is just shy of 30MB - so all those icons, background images, off-screen bitmap buffers etc. are just one thing that is sucking RAM.

 

[avkills]

Is anybody waiting to trade in their 2019 Mac Pro for the M2 Mac Pro? If the price is that much lower are they going to give us 2 M2 Mac Pros?

No because Apple does not give you jack **** for a trade in price on them. In fact the trade in value is a joke.

 

[jerryk]

It is called Progress!!

 

[jerryk]

Speaking as a survivor of the 80's (you thought we were all gone, didn't you), "everyone" didn't write in assembly language, only some of us. We really did have other languages then - C, Pascal, Fortran, Lisp, Cobol, Basic, tons of others. No Python or Perl quite yet, but lots of Awk and Sed and Yacc and Lex and shell scripting.

Writing in assembly can get you some space savings over C, but not as much as you think - C is basically a generic high-level assembler (and it's still the language that most operating systems are written in). What makes something like Monterey big is not the choice of C over assembly, but rather... just how damn complicated it is. It's doing so many things. Oh, and if we were writing OS's in assembler these days, we'd be at least a decade behind where we are now in capabilities of the machine. The reason for writing in C rather than assembler, is that little extra bit of abstraction makes it much easier to reason about and write large systems.

Also, C lets you include macro assembler on a lot of platforms when you want to really control the metal.

 

[skitidetdu]

The only reason that the Mac Pro seams to excist is to justify a higher price point on newer apple silicone Mac’s.

 

[qutoh]

Something performing better while costing less than a mac? Shocked! Shocked, I say!

well, not that shocked.

 

[Tagbert]

The only reason that the Mac Pro seams to excist is to justify a higher price point on newer apple silicone Mac’s.

Or to execute professional and scientific use cases that require large amounts of RAM, tons of storage, and/or massive GPU. All things that the new M2 MBP doesn’t have.

BTW - one thing that both that Mac Pro and the MBP can do is run a spell check.

 

[ikir]

Yeah but I bet the Mac Pro runs Windows faster

Using sometimes Windows on M1 Pro... never seen a faster real PC. even Microsoft x86 emulator is quite good.