maclancer
macrumors regular
It maybe true that the 2019 may replace the 5,1 but the 2019 is still too expensive and no worthy to have when you can pretty much buy a Mac Studio with faster CPU for the same amount you will waste in a 2019 MacPro.
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Apple Confirms Mac Pro Is Dead, No Future Models Planned
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The Mac Pro is dead - long live the Mac !
Very sad but the writing has been on the wall for years.
The Mac Pro cheese grater was the machine of most people’s dreams for much of the 00s as was its predecessor the power mac - both the cheese grater power mac g5 and the blue plastic g3.
All of them stood out so much in a sea of beige plastic pc towers.
Very sad but the writing has been on the wall for years.
The Mac Pro cheese grater was the machine of most people’s dreams for much of the 00s as was its predecessor the power mac - both the cheese grater power mac g5 and the blue plastic g3.
All of them stood out so much in a sea of beige plastic pc towers.
MP 5,1 owner. Pour one out for the Mac Pros. I loved mine a lot, did a lot of great work. (Actually was a 4,1 -> 5,1 with loads of upgrades).
Super easy prediction to make when the Mac Studio was first released.
Happy_John
Suspended
I don’t mean ithe 7,1 will replace the 5,1 as the “archetypal ” Mac Pro, that will always the the 5,1, if only due the the sheer amount of them sold, deployed and kept in use for over a decade. I meant that it did succeed the 5,1, as it it came after, and it kept a lot of the design philosophy of the 5,1, which neither the trashcan nor the M2 iterations did.
The 7,1 is a lovely, lovely machine, and I hope to add one to my collection one day, but, without knowing the sakes figures fir it, I don’t think it sold anything close to the figure the 5,1 did.
There was a point that, if you walked into any recording studio, graphic design house or any “creative/media” business, there’d be at least on 5,1 chugging sling, being the reliable tractor that it was.
It was everywhere.
Agent_Apple
macrumors member
I have worked in Film Production, Visual Effects, Environmental Systems, Drug Discovery and Military enterprises. Not once did we upgrade the RAM in an existing system. Hobbyists do that. Commercial users buy systems with support contracts, keep them for a set number of years and then replace them.
Losing the Mac Pro will hurt a number of those markets, simply because Thunderbolt 5 can only deliver about 64Gb/s for PCIe, not fast enough for 100gb/s Ethernet (let alone dual 100Gb/s needed for SMPTE 2110 redundancy).
I am always amused by all the people who would never have purchased any of these devices explaining to those of us who have why we do not need them and why they do not meet our needs.
Frixo Cool
macrumors regular
I'll just add that Steve Jobs personally used a Mac Pro with Cinema 30".
I've been using Mac towers since the PowerPC 8100 model, followed by the 8500, 8600, G3 Mini tower, G4, G4 dual, G5 dual, Mac Pro 2.1, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, 6.1, and now 7.1. What great and reliable machines, we built our company on them!
I'm extremely sorry about this and all external third-party solutions are never as fast and reliable as internal PCIe expansions.
Now that they've screwed us pro users, can we at least get an iMac Pro 32"?
I've been using Mac towers since the PowerPC 8100 model, followed by the 8500, 8600, G3 Mini tower, G4, G4 dual, G5 dual, Mac Pro 2.1, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, 6.1, and now 7.1. What great and reliable machines, we built our company on them!
I'm extremely sorry about this and all external third-party solutions are never as fast and reliable as internal PCIe expansions.
Now that they've screwed us pro users, can we at least get an iMac Pro 32"?
fuchsdh
macrumors 68020
It does feel like the Mac Pro was more murdered than died of natural causes, as it's not like workstations have disappeared—it's a healthy, albeit relatively small, market.
I hope we get a good tell-all of the Tim Cook years in a few, because I'd love to know exactly what was going on in Apple from 2017-2020, the time the shift to Apple Silicon was being decided on at the same time they were repositioning the Mac Pro as a higher-end Intel workstation. Obviously the Mac Pro fell outside of the type of computer that Apple was willing to offer at present, and they decided spending additional resources on it was not worth it. But the extra $1K jump in price at the same time as offering a worse product in every respect except for processor speed with the M2 version does feel like it was a clear "let's justify axing it by making it an unattractive product" positioning.
I think there's good reasons not to produce a Mac Pro—it's absolutely true that more and more professional tasks can be done without a slotbox, and the tradeoffs Apple makes in not offering a machine with user-upgradable ram and GPU pays major dividends on all their other products. But there's also the counterargument to be made that a Mac Pro can just be the more flexible product that can cover the "everything else" gamut, the same way the Mac mini has done some of that on the low end.
I do hate the framing taken by a lot of Apple pundits though that the product was a dinosaur that no one needed. Okay, you don't need it, because you haven't needed a pro Mac for your work since, what, the Intel iMacs era? I think the fact that there was never really a professional creative with an audience really hurt the chance of Apple ever seeing the value of the market (Siracusa doesn't count.) Also, when Apple spent years winnowing trust in the product category, you can't really say it failed because of consumers. I'd love to pop into the alternate universe where Apple did the same product swerves with the Mac Pro but they also updated it at least every two years instead of letting it sit fallow every single time. Somehow I doubt it would be doing as dismally.
I hope we get a good tell-all of the Tim Cook years in a few, because I'd love to know exactly what was going on in Apple from 2017-2020, the time the shift to Apple Silicon was being decided on at the same time they were repositioning the Mac Pro as a higher-end Intel workstation. Obviously the Mac Pro fell outside of the type of computer that Apple was willing to offer at present, and they decided spending additional resources on it was not worth it. But the extra $1K jump in price at the same time as offering a worse product in every respect except for processor speed with the M2 version does feel like it was a clear "let's justify axing it by making it an unattractive product" positioning.
I think there's good reasons not to produce a Mac Pro—it's absolutely true that more and more professional tasks can be done without a slotbox, and the tradeoffs Apple makes in not offering a machine with user-upgradable ram and GPU pays major dividends on all their other products. But there's also the counterargument to be made that a Mac Pro can just be the more flexible product that can cover the "everything else" gamut, the same way the Mac mini has done some of that on the low end.
I do hate the framing taken by a lot of Apple pundits though that the product was a dinosaur that no one needed. Okay, you don't need it, because you haven't needed a pro Mac for your work since, what, the Intel iMacs era? I think the fact that there was never really a professional creative with an audience really hurt the chance of Apple ever seeing the value of the market (Siracusa doesn't count.) Also, when Apple spent years winnowing trust in the product category, you can't really say it failed because of consumers. I'd love to pop into the alternate universe where Apple did the same product swerves with the Mac Pro but they also updated it at least every two years instead of letting it sit fallow every single time. Somehow I doubt it would be doing as dismally.
How is it old architecture? 😂 The M5 Max was just released. There are tons of people that want the M5 Ultra. The rest of your comment is just nonsense.
Timpetus
macrumors 6502a
I think this proves the cylindrical MP was the right choice, they just needed to update it properly. It would have been an amazing machine with TB3 or better, and the thermal issues were Intel's fault and would be remedied by AS. The Studio is essentially the same concept, and it ate the MP's lunch from the start. Now it's killed it entirely.
maflynn
macrumors Broadwell
Will it?
I'm not trying to be coy, but Apple has not updated the Mac Pro 3 years ago, and before that it was 2019. I don't think the loss of the mac pro is going to be felt very much. Apple doesn't tend to kill off profitable products, so its clear that this machine never really gained any footing
I fully agree, with TB5 (which supports PCIe 4), things that used to be internal can now be externally connected, I'll also add that with Apple Silicon the things you can connect through PCIe are rather limited, essentially disk drives and audio / video interfaces, with graphics cards being out of the picture.
There will be a time when TB6 (PCIe 5?) and perhaps an M6 or M7 Ultra chip in a Mac Studio will finally have parity with the insane amount of RAM and video cards that were usual with the Mac Pro.
It would be very un-Apple-like, but it would be amazing if they would just sell an ATX-form-factor Mac motherboard with PCIe and NVMe slots. This would be particularly useful for anyone who needs to fit the hardware in a specific enclosure (1U rack server, vehicle mount enclosure, etc.).
Anyway, the whole thing is sad, especially after the 2019 model, which was, in almost every way, an excellent product and one of Apple's best ever.
Because Apple is the best at marketing. You can see examples of that on this very forum of people upgrading their iPhone every year, watches, MacBooks, etc.
Apple made the Mac Pro a niche product based on their pricing. They did not upgrade it regularly like they do with all their other products because I am sure it is not making them any money because only a very small select group of people are buying that machine. Unlike The tower Macs in the past that gave the user options and choice, those work horses lasted a very long time and are in some places still being used in production.
3D modeling and after effects are still better even on my RTX 3080 TI setup. Apple doesn’t have an answer for the high end market. And I guess they never will.
Best seller for refurb companies. Not a best seller for Apple. That was part of the problem. If Apple is not receiving revenues then those are not really customers. A vocal minority will claim that they were 'teaching Apple a lesson" by not buying product from Apple. However, in part the lesson was that Apple didn't critically need them as customers. There was lots of misguided celebration about how they 'bent Apple to their will' in 2017 when got announcement that there would be another Intel Mac Pro. But the entry price increased 100%.
Very similar to the diminishing returns dynamics of the GPU card market for the Mac Pro. Apple would work an official card for macOS. Then a large builk of folks would skip it (and supporting the driver work that went into that) and use an off-the-shelf Windows card to save costs. Again 'taught Apple lesson' of not paying for the drivers, but over time it sends message "these folks don't want to pay for work done". ( the rest of the Mac models were paying GPU work because it was embedded. When they stopped underwriting 3rd party GPU work... it stopped. )
Why bother when 3rd parties are going to do it? Apple doing a Thunderbolt enclosure would only inhibit drawing more players to fill that role.
The extension box is primarily just a 'container'. Is the grand Apple Industrial design, going to be happy doing just a "container" for cards that require wires ( given Apple's 'war on wires' outlook ). Yes, Apple does covers for their phones , but also largely say don't need one. And those are at a complete diferent unit volume scale. Even still the number of 3rd party options greatly outnumber Apple's, so there is little suppression of compeition.
No. SSDs did come down in $/TB. Apple never priced their own that way. They kept the $/TB the same and used storage to pad margins. HDDs have disappeared from most consumer PC devices.
The 'problem' more so is that Apple thinks most folks are happy enough with the one , and only one, drive that Apple provides. And that it is 'fast enough' for vast majority of folks. And maybe one more x4 PCI-e v3 SSD is enough for most people.
Apple knows some folks need PCI-e slots. Otherwise they wouldn't have released the MP 2023. The question is how many folks and how many units they would buy. Thunderbolt delivers PCI-e to any Mac with a Thunderbolt port. So a wide variety of PCI-e cards can be used by those that need them. Thunderbolt v5 only expands that coverage to a wider set.
Apple also trimmed off one whole class of high bandwidth , low latency PCI-e cards by merging the GPU with the SoC. The GPU gets much higher bandwidth and lower latency with that trade-off. Thunderbolt is also weaved in ( No MPX connector 'work around' data problem. )
There is a class of A/V cards left but the MP 2023 covers most of them and that future TBv5 Studio can cover a significant number of those. Apple could also maybe add a Occu-Link x8 connection later which would cover even more.
FilthyMuppetInnuendo
macrumors regular
But that’s just it. The floor can be changed now, because there’s no range between two other machines in which the Studio has to “fit.” Even if they keep the current pricing bumps of the Studio the same, the floor can be raised because there’s no Mac Pro “ceiling.”
adisor19
macrumors member
Sadly TB5 is not fast enough for even 100Gbps Ethernet. As it stands, the mac is now stranded at 50Gbps Ethernet since TB5 is only capable of carrying 4 lanes of PCIe 4.0 for a total of 64Gbps. There is no way now to get 100Gbps, 200Gbps or 400Gbps on a Mac and THAT is the problem here. If Apple has any sense, they should make a MacStudio version available with a QSFP-DD slot so that it can be used in truly high end environments.
TB is
But do they upgrade storage?
also do they use raid in workstations?
also seeing how the mac pro with build in storage was raid 0 only with extreme markup what did they do with that??
now they do use pci-e cards for video in and sound right?
they can do that but apple being apple can vendor lock the modules with an X1.5-X2 markup
With macOS on Intel dying in 2026, Apple should sell a $7-12K machine in 2024? No. That would not make more sense at all. It was bad enough, they were still selling Intel boxes in 2023 at those price levels (with 'dead in the water' CPU and GPUs).
It would have made more sense to hit the deadline for the transition of 2022. (about two years will transition). Once the Mac Pro lagged past the deadline only reinforced that the Mac Pro was a 'hobby' product for Apple with varying interest/priorities. Skip the "Extreme" stuff and get the M2 Ultra Mac Pro out closer to the M1 Ultra Studio release and before the M2 gen Studio. They might have pulled more numbers out of the Mac Studio product and put some numbers behind the Mac Pro. Additionally, could done more to pull in some 'forward looking' PCI-e cards to the Mac Pro that might grow market.
The previous 4+ year product update there were both irregular and lengthy were a problem they did not solve with the transition. That hole decade long track record was loosing user base all by itself.