Apple Confirms Mac Pro Is Dead, No Future Models Planned

[jimmy_john]

Which makes sense.

You can develop the M5 chip, which goes into tens of millions of Mac computers, or for the same (or more) effort, develop some M5 extreme chip which will show up only in a few thousand Mac Pro units, and which may never make its money back.

Seems like Apple is simply being judicious in where it decides to allocate its time and engineering resources.

If you’re an accountant, it does make sense.

But the brand was once inspiring. And that is, obviously, no longer the case.

There really is no reason for professional power users or those aspiring to be to continue to consider their machines.

 

[Dreamail]

You can develop the M5 chip, which goes into tens of millions of Mac computers, or for the same (or more) effort, develop some M5 extreme chip which will show up only in a few thousand Mac Pro units, and which may never make its money back.

Seems like Apple is simply being judicious in where it decides to allocate its time and engineering resources.

What I do not quite understand in all this is that Apple had long ago realized this and supposedly fixed this.

Apple in recent M class chip developments made their Apple Silicon much more configurable. Their latest M5 SoC enclosures allow to mix and match RAM, number of compute cores and their types, GPU units, (and AI units I suppose too), that get put into a package.
This is much more configurable than Apple's UltraFusion interconnect ever allowed for.

I had always assumed that this was specifically done to allow for highest end Mac Pro chipsets that can be be configured with lots of RAM and compute power, even in small production quantities as they can now mix and match individual building blocks and don't need it all done as one massive silicon that fuses 4 "Max" chips together.

And then Apple kills the Mac Pro...
It makes no sense to me.


The company I work for creates CG VFX and many of our render scenes already require 512 GB (!) of RAM.

The old Mac Pro was expandable to 1.5 TB of RAM.
Yet today's most high-end Mac Studio (with the Ultra chip) stops at 256 GB of RAM. Not enough.
It depends on the scene file. Some large scenes seem OK with using Unified Memory, but some just crash due to a lack of physical RAM.

Macs are not sufficient for highend uses anymore. Sorry to see Apple dropped out of the market altogether...

 

[JayKay514]

As a 30-year-plus Mac user I’ll say this:

• I do prefer everything to be in one box. Having to use docks, external storage enclosures and Ethernet dongles adds more cable clutter and wall warts.
• As a prosumer, I have no need for PCIe slots. I do audio and relatively light graphics, and current M-series chips are more than capable. I have no investment in DSP powered plugins, as native has largely equalled or overtaken them. I use external audio interfaces as it’s a home studio.
• That said…I can sympathize with pro studios because serious work requires tons of bidirectional i/o and low latency, and PCIe is often the only option.
• So yeah: A Mac Studio with user-accessible SSD expansion slots, and a range of matching expansion enclosures powered off TB would be one path.

 

[JoeG4]

It depends on your personal level of "pain" that you are willing to endure, I suppose... 😅

1) Noise Pollution:

I have done both routes, Mac Pro with everything internal, and other Macs with external HDD boxes.
All the external boxes I ever had, were extremely noisy in comparison. The fans are like airjet engines almost as they typically spin full speed and are not temperature controlled - at least at night they sounded very loud.
Also these 3.5" HDDs are not really quiet either. The Mac Pro shielded the sound better, and as it had a mostly quiet, temperature controlled fan system, most of the time the whole system was a lot easier on the ears.

2) Design:

If you look today, how many external 3.5" HDD boxes can you find that are perfectly matching the Mac Studio? All in silver. No space gray. No black plastic bits. With a design perfectly matching the Mac Studio.
Some people may not care, but I really despise having a beautifully designed Mac Studio with an ugly black plastic box next to it. Or space gray design.
It seems the only external boxes I could find in silver are USB-C 3.1 speed only. Not Thunderbolt 4 or 5.

Also most of these external boxes do not have an internal power supply either. So you have maybe a lovely silver box - but with a terrible black plastic power brick lying next to it.
Ugh.

3) Reliability. I've never, in all of my years, had to worry about internal drives. As Apple fans love saying, "it just works". I don't have to worry about overloading the USB power, I don't have to worry about my drive ejecting itself or not waking from sleep OR REFUSING TO SLEEP. Stuff just worked. Also, if you want to use 2 or 4 NVMEs you're going to take a performance hit or need external power.

4) Costs. An 80gbps nvme enclosure costs $150-200 if you want to get full performance out of a pcie gen 5 drive.

I don't get why everyone hand waves this away. External storage sucks.

 

[opeter]

Wait, it is not April 1st. 😕 Or is it already? 🙃
I somehow had the feeling, that this thing is dead. But why did they announce the EOL only now and not, let's say a year ago? Did they really sell that many of it? I doubt it.

So, what it will be the future:
- Mac mini well be downgraded (aka internals of the Macbook Neo)
- the powerhouse will be the Mac Studio

 

[pintolcv]

Nothing to add here, agreed! But the MacBook Neo seems to sell incredibly well. It is sold out in Germany.

It's not new what would be the result... Lower price, metal body, good Darwin kernel, access to Apple ecosystem, third apps, for most diary use it's more than enough for masses (me included).

 

[pintolcv]

So that makes Linux your only other choice. But many users are not comfortable with it and there is not a lot of software that supports Linux well.
If one wants to (or has to) use Microsoft Office then Linux is not a great choice either. Not every Word document really translates all that well into Libre Office...

So, for all those people a Mac is the last option. Not a Dell.

If i didn't use mac, linux it would be the right path. But with base M4 macmini 600€, i don't have to buy component by component to do a computer. I don't use a computer for games for require external GPU's. For that, playstation with 500€. By the way that have a FreeBSD OS!

 

[XboxEvolved]

It's definitely sad. My first Mac was a used PowerMac G4 Digital Audio 533Mhz, 384MB ram, and a GeForce 3 64MB. Maybe we will see it come back in the future but if the fact that stuff like the Mac mini is backordered all the way to into September I don't see that happening anytime soon.

 

[jlc1978]

Business users of Macs need some of those high-end systems to be available as part of the ecosystem even if they don't need that many. (MBAs/professional administrators often don't get that. They want every product, or bus run, to make money.)

The whole point of a company is to make a return on their investment; and sometimes that means not making a product, even if there is some demand for it, that won't meet ROI goals. The resources expended on such a product are better spent elsewhere.

 

[lazyrighteye]

The Mac Pro was the greatest computer of all time.

The studio is ugly as hell and will get even uglier and messier with cables and breakout boxes attached, but if the M5 ultra will be the fastest computer ever made, I can deal with it.

Someone will build a riser that turns a Studio into a mini tower. Cable management, external drives - you name it - all neatly ticked in to the riser. Hell, that prob exists.

 

[pintolcv]

Ever since Apple transitioned from x86 architecture to ARM with Apple Silicon, it was obvious that RAM, storage, and the GPU would be integrated into a concept similar to iPhones and iPads. In my view, this dictated several consequences:

1. The impossibility of upgrading the CPU, RAM, or using an external GPU;
2. Gaming — Apple will never be a gaming platform. One only needs to look at how the M-architecture doesn't support natively DirectX or Vulkan, and major game titles companies have never compiled their most iconic games, like Call of Duty or FIFA, for the Metal API, nor does it seem like they ever will;

It's not need to do anything:
1. For music and video editing, the GPUs of the new architecture seem to be sufficient;
2. MS office is there for arm;
3. For vector applications, Autodesk has the respective versions, so there’s no issue here;
4. For photography, Adobe also has everything available for Darwin.

Nonetheless, with the financial resources Apple has, they should find a technical solution to allow for RAM expansion in future models - crucial. They should also provide subsidies for certain developers companies to compile their most iconic game titles without after toolkits for Metal. Native for Metal. If not they will just do for directx or Vulkan.

 

[jlc1978]

Nonetheless, with the financial resources Apple has, they should find a technical solution to allow for RAM expansion in future models - crucial.

While that would be good for some subset of the user base, even for them it may not be a better solution. Apple's upgrades would likely be expensive, and the RAM have tight performance specs to work properly. While reputable suppliers *might* make compliant RAM, I suspect there would be a number of low end cheap stuff that would not function well. I remember that being an issue when I upgraded some of my MacBooks, I had to find the right quality RAM to get it to work.

From Apple's financial perspective, upgradable RAM means less buyers upgrade at POS, costing them revenue they may not make up with future upgrade sales.

 

[BSDnostalgia]

The whole point of a company is to make a return on their investment; and sometimes that means not making a product, even if there is some demand for it, that won't meet ROI goals. The resources expended on such a product are better spent elsewhere.

Of course you can't lose money on all your products. Like the old joke about the coffee shop that lost money on a regular cup of coffee, but, the owner was going to "make it up on volume". I get that.

But, I also get that long-term customers are investing their own time, experience, and expertise when utilizing a product line, and sometimes they require some specialized products. There are various ways that these requirements can be met. They don't have to have the same margin as the high-volume products. That's bean-counter-think. The goal is to make a profit, not make a certain margin on every nut and bolt they sell.

Apple used to make those high-end systems part of their marketing to "creatives". I think they still could. But, it is more difficult now because of the power and cooling demands of the highest end GPUs.

I actually like their current approach-- they can scale up to 80 Mx GPUs on a single module in a Studio-sized enclosure, and 80 M5 GPUs would be pretty fast if they build that system. For a lot of users, it is more CPU than they need to get enough GPU. I just wish they didn't charge so much for SSD storage, but, given today's huge jump in demand, it is going to be a while before those prices come down.

 

[jlc1978]

But, I also get that long-term customers are investing their own time, experience, and expertise when utilizing a product line, and sometimes they require some specialized products. There are various ways that these requirements can be met. They don't have to have the same margin as the high-volume products. That's bean-counter-think. The goal is to make a profit, not make a certain margin on every nut and bolt they sell.

Sure they might not make as much of a margin, but there is a point where the profit margin is simply too small to be worth chasing that market. A company needs to look at where they can get the best return for their investment, and just becasue someone wants to be a customer doesn't mean it's worth making a product for them. That said, sometimes a high end lower margin product makes sense, whether is a flagship product to showcase tech, or because add on sales more than make up for the smaller margin. Of course, that might mean proprietary interface standards for slots and thus control access to the add on market.

It's easy to blame bean counters, but the reality is a company has only so many resources, even one as big as Apple, and needs to focus them on their most profitable markets.

 

[BSDnostalgia]

It's easy to blame bean counters,

I do blame bean counters because of all the damage they have done over the years. Because of killing off profitable products and product lines because they didn't measure up to the margins on whatever the best-selling product was. Because they often don't see past the next quarter to realize that the hot product's gravy train won't last much longer. Because they refuse to understand anything that isn't a commodity or a service. Because they would rather maximize ROI and other artificial metrics than actual profit. (I could go on.) So, yeah, I do find it is easy to blame bean counters. 😂🙄

but the reality is a company has only so many resources, even one as big as Apple, and needs to focus them on their most profitable markets.

So, from these discussions, the Mac Pro had a couple of things that can't be easily replaced. It was, sometimes, under some conditions, quiet (but, not always in my personal experience!), upgradeable components (somewhat, sometimes), solid, reliable, limited cables necessary compared to needing a bunch of outboard boxes, and aesthetically pleasing. That is a tall order with today's technology. Today's prices are low (accounting for inflation) because of the success of the mass production of smart phones. That technology can be scaled up reasonably to the size of an M3 Ultra. I don't see why you couldn't scale it up in memory capacity to 1 TB. But, clearly, storage is a problem, because people can't afford a PetaByte on day 1, and they tend to accumulate storage over time. I kind of think we may need to evolve into a better way to use NAS for home and small office. For the add-on boards, I think there should be some way to standardize what is needed into a few options for outboard PCIe boxes.

 

[jlc1978]

Because they would rather maximize ROI and other artificial metrics than actual profit. (I could go on.) So, yeah, I do find it is easy to blame bean counters.

Let's standardize on profit as revenue - all costs to produce the product.

Focusing on profit, is, IMHO, a common misconception. Not all profit is good profit, and not all profit is worth chasing. Firing customers is soethimes the right, if counter intuitive, approach.

ROI is a better metric because it represents how well you are using your resources. For example, if I can invest at 4% essentially risk free, and product that produces a lower return, regardless of profit, is a bad investment since I can make more money with the 4% investment.

So, from these discussions, the Mac Pro had a couple of things that can't be easily replaced. It was, sometimes, under some conditions, quiet (but, not always in my personal experience!), upgradeable components (somewhat, sometimes), solid, reliable, limited cables necessary compared to needing a bunch of outboard boxes, and aesthetically pleasing.

It was a great machine, with a lot of potential. Unfortunately, it likely simply wasn't a big enough seller to justify its continuance with ARM based chips.

That is a tall order with today's technology.

Which is why the better approach is to see how existing products can sell into teh Pro's market, should Apple chose to go after it.

 

[Galas]

Not surprising. Once Apple went with the unified architecture of the M series the Mac Pro was dead. There are a few of us in the pro audio/video world that would have loved a modern M5 Extreme Mac Pro that could handle multiple PCI cards without resorting to an external chassis but the fact that graphics, storage and ram are unified, it defeats the purpose of the Pro.

Still using a 2019 Intel Mac Pro rack with two Avid HDX cards, two UAD Octo cards and an 8TB M.2 SSD PCI raid. The Mac Studio with an external chassis that’s in my not so distant future will not be a cool looking, well designed or quiet. View attachment 2617256

Absolutely gorgeous

 

[uczcret]

Because they often don't see past the next quarter to realize that the hot product's gravy train won't last much longer.

So if iPhone and services revenues dry up, Mac Pro sales will step in and save the company?

 

[Galas]

I prefer 2.5" SATA SSDs still.
NVMEs have a mount box and capacity issue as they are also seemingly stuck at 8TB.
To get to a 80-100 TB storage capacity you need 10-12 of them.

Show me an external extension box in aluminum silver that has room for 12 or 16 M.2 NVMEs!
All the ones I can find support only up to 8 NVMEs, are black and only for rack mount.
Not really what I am looking for.

It is not only about the price, it is also about the mount options. NVME is still too young.

SATA vs NVMe SSDS are not even comparable. NVMe are order of magnitudes faster.

 

[BSDnostalgia]

So if iPhone and services revenues dry up, Mac Pro sales will step in and save the company?

Mac sales might save the company, and a "Mac Pro" might help keep the Mac ecosystem healthy.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Mac sales might save the company, and a "Mac Pro" might help keep the Mac ecosystem healthy.

The "ecosystem" is rapidly being destroyed in my opinion.

To have a healthy ecosystem, one needs a diverse product and offering mix and Tim has continued to whittle everything down to being an iPhone in various shapes and sizes, while locking everything down to juice "Services revenue".

Also, halo products are really important and they basically don't have any now.

 

[Flint Ironstag]

With the massive war chest apple has, they can do both. They literally have more money than they know what to do with at the moment, and neglecting a 39 billion dollar division because … reasons? is stupid.

The mac team have their own management structure no doubt, and can handle themselves assuming they get funding, of which there is plenty to go around.

Furthermore:
The Mac currently has MASSIVE growth potential:

Microsoft are totally screwing the pooch with Windows 11, none of the PC vendors have Apple’s purchasing power over OEMs in this current RAM supply crisis and they have a class leading architecture; they’re at least 2-3 years ahead of the PC market and the only manufacturer who has the full stack.

And to add to all this: Microsoft has killed off support for huge swathes of PC hardware. People are in the market for new hardware!

If I were Apple: Immediately reinstate MacOS Server / unlimited licenses / free. Make a cheaper rackmount server / bring back networking devices and time capsule that just work. Eat everybody's lunch.

In all honesty i suspect one reason for the mac pro existing still is so that existing customers can simply pull out their budget for hardware from 3 years ago, update the quote and present it to management to buy a bunch of new mac pros.

otherwise, the whole question of “what’s this? why are we buying mac studios now?” comes up, when the business has simply been buying mac Pros for 2 decades.

This right here. There's so much inertia with small to mid-sized organizations even. They don't want to switch. They don't want something new. The Mac Pros they had at every technician / architect / attorney / doctor desk for the past 20 years - yeah, they want the new version of that. Don't make any waves. Old money is like that.

3) Reliability. I've never, in all of my years, had to worry about internal drives. As Apple fans love saying, "it just works". I don't have to worry about overloading the USB power, I don't have to worry about my drive ejecting itself or not waking from sleep OR REFUSING TO SLEEP. Stuff just worked. Also, if you want to use 2 or 4 NVMEs you're going to take a performance hit or need external power.

4) Costs. An 80gbps nvme enclosure costs $150-200 if you want to get full performance out of a pcie gen 5 drive.

I don't get why everyone hand waves this away. External storage sucks.

I practice cable management at home and it's ALWAYS in the back of my mind that the damn TB3 cables are not secure. I hate it.

Wait, it is not April 1st. 😕 Or is it already? 🙃
I somehow had the feeling, that this thing is dead. But why did they announce the EOL only now and not, let's say a year ago? Did they really sell that many of it? I doubt it.

So, what it will be the future:
- Mac mini well be downgraded (aka internals of the Macbook Neo)
- the powerhouse will be the Mac Studio

The powerhouse will be the Mac Studio. If that statement doesn't make you want to vomit, I don't know what will.

We need 1.5 TB RAM and have maxed out the MacPro from 2019 in this respect. When will the Mac Studio also have 1.5 RAM or more do you think?

What is your workload to max 1.5TB RAM? 😮

 

[Zondar]

Aww, I'm wistfully sad about this news.

The crippling problem Apple faced with the Pro tower is that the M-series chips themselves are not really designed for external RAM or graphics expandability. Without that, a tower configuration isn't much more than a rack for hard disks.

My old 3,1 was the most awesome and longest-lasting single computer I've ever owned. Over time it was upgraded to the moon and back. I waited many years for something from Apple to replace it, and even tried a hackintosh (not a good experience), but eventually gave up and moved my heavy computing to a Linux box.

When the 2023 Pro came out, I got overly excited and ordered one, wheels and all, but I changed my mind before it was ready to ship. In retrospect, I'm certainly glad I did!

RIP Mac Pro tower.

 

[kaycrystal626]

Have you notice every Apple product start with over price like $700 wheels die? I am looking at Apple Vision Pro to die next!

 

[Minocan]

All we need are couple of nerds who would hack the new M5's to Mac Pro towers.