Apple Confirms Mac Pro Is Dead, No Future Models Planned

[mode11]

- Spec matched, desktops like Mini and Studio are a bit cheaper than their laptop equivalents

An M4 Max Studio (and presumably M5 Max) is a lot cheaper than a M5 Max MBP. £900, when comparing the base spec of both, with the Studio's storage increased to 2TB to match the MBP. And that's the 14", which tends to throttle the performance of a Max chip. The more-comparable 16" is £1300 more. Plus, going for base storage and an external TB5 SSD is a lot more practical with the desktop, saving you potentially hundreds more.

by default I recommend Mac laptops, and Windows desktops.

Same.

Other than the aforementioned, there just isn't a very compelling case to be made for Apple's desktops anymore. I switched from cheese grater to MBP in 2022 and haven't regretted it once.

Presumably you're CPU bound rather than GPU bound, then (or make use of the media engines). The AS CPU cores are some of the best in the biz, and will smoke older Intel ones. The GPUs of the most expensive AS chips, however, are respectable rather than mind-blowing.

In clamshell mode it behaves just like a silent desktop with my Echo 20 hub, and I can pick it up at a moment's notice throw it in my backpack and have all my stuff with me wherever I go. Best of both worlds.

It won't behave like a silent desktop when running demanding loads; more like a noisy one. There's also pros and cons to having all your eggs in one expensive, mobile basket, that could be taken out of action with a single drop.

 

[AdamBuker]

Ah, it's a corporately managed machine, so I can't install anything that isn't from a pre-approved list without making a Business Case to my eight different bosses here at Initech.

Oh by the way, Bill wanted me to remind you that we are no longer putting covers on the TPS reports. Did you get the memo? If you didn’t get the memo, I can make you a copy.

 

[innerproduct]

just waiting to finally getting back on a mac desktop. I need the cooling for sustained loads/silence and the ports.
A baseline m5 ultra will probably be a fantastic workstation but it irritates me that i will not be able to just pop in an extra m2 ssd or a PCI ssd card. Not being able to clean it out or repair also feels wrong. Apple are one of the worst greenwashers there are. Things should be replaceable and repairable.

 

[Joe The Dragon]

Ah, I'd argue that even with the $6k base price, with PCIe slots, it was worth keeping around and updating. The cult following on the used market alone would be worth the glow. Would love to see total sales figures for 6,1 vs 7,1 FWIW.

One day we may get a peek behind the curtains... I sure would like to know. Re: Apple becoming a phone / home automation / services company, this is EXACTLY why it is bone-headed to discontinue the networking devices:

People want commercial grade firewalls in their homes. Apple firewall - hold your iphone next to it, you're instantly authenticated. Under 18 devices are recognized as such, and parental controls automatically applied. Effortless Time Machine backups. All that stuff. Apple would be killing Ubiquiti and whoever else.

Nobody wants the drawbacks of a 'powerful' (it's still just a bunch of studios) cluster if you can stuff it all into one box. Especially when the box is quiet like a MP. I don't know how loud studios get under load.

Let us imagine for a minute that Apple decided to keep Intel + AMD on the high end for now. Do you think we would have a (dual??) Xeon and MPX modules with a higher performance envelope than 4 studios daisy-chained? Damn right we would.

But instead, a **** Mac Studio is now the flagship. Are. You. Serious. 😐. Have you no pride. Seriously, wtf Apple.

may of had an AMD cpu that has more pci-e lanes then intel.

 

[JayKay514]

Oh by the way, Bill wanted me to remind you that we are no longer putting covers on the TPS reports. Did you get the memo? If you didn’t get the memo, I can make you a copy.

(to self, next morning) I think I'm just not gonna go.

 

[JayKay514]

may of had an AMD cpu that has more pci-e lanes then intel.

Yeah, in theory an Epyc-powered Mac Pro might have been possible, but at that point it's just a server PC running a different OS, and there's no Apple value-add.

Apple's whole point of switching to their own silicon is to have more control over the entire product, and not to be bottlenecked by an external supplier who hits a wall, like what happened with Intel.

In terms of power-per-watt, an Epyc system idles around 100w because it's not designed for desktop tasks, it's supposed to be running 24/7 in a data center, plus it has no iGPU, so you need to factor in a separate card, plus the relative speed loss of having to send stuff out over the PCIe bus vs the unified SoC architecture.

Even if we look at laptop chips like Ryzen AI Max+ 395, it has nearly double the TDP vs the M5 Max, while performing worse on most benchmarks.

 

[innerproduct]

Anyone of you remember this old rumor/patent stuff?

Cylinder but with metal lattice. Would have been cool (actually cooled well!) and a good fit for high end mac studio/pro hybrid.

 

[Dreamail]

Anyone of you remember this old rumor/patent stuff? View attachment 2622703
Cylinder but with metal lattice. Would have been cool (actually cooled well!) and a good fit for high end mac studio/pro hybrid.

I can totally see a future "Mac Studio Ultra" to have that kind of cylindrical design again, as a throwback to the "trashcan" Mac Pro with the lattice holes of the last Mac Pro iteration.

Ever since the "G4 Cube", introduced at Mac World in July 2000, Apple is chasing a screen-less compact desktop design.
I am sure the current Mac Studio will not be the last design variant.

But any completely new design will likely emerge only in the post-Cook era.

 

[Dreamail]

This whole Mac Pro discussion, on a higher level, showcases a potential long-term issue with current Apple hardware, that I had been thinking about a lot lately.

It is not merely an issue for the Mac Pro but for every Apple product line, including MacBooks.

While Apple silicon allows for amazing integration and with that comes high compute and access speeds, the fact that RAM and SSDs are now bundled into a package, which is no longer user upgradable or transferable, may end up biting Apple one day. And soon.
Especially if the SSD/RAM shortage due to high demand for AI data centers continues. And it looks like it will.

If one purchases a high-spec MacBook Pro today with 128GB RAM and 8TB of SSD storage - all that investment is basically turning into paperweights the moment a new hardware is purchased.

In the "old days" one could often transfer RAM and the HD from the previous device to the next hardware.
Just purchase new hardware with the lowest RAM and HD specs (or include none at all) and then install the previous hardware's RAM and HD into the new hardware.
Sure, the transferred old RAM and HD may not be as fast as the latest generation, but the former investment was preserved.
Especially with highest-end specs, like an 8TB SSD, it really hursts to not be able to transfer it over to the next hardware.

When Apple planned its move to integrated Apple silicon, over a decade ago, they probably thought that prices for RAM and SSDs will just continue to come down to the point that these will become cheap commodities, where it no longer matters much to throw the old ones away when new hardware is purchased.
I bet they did not see it coming that AI data centers would cause a sudden massive shortage.

Now imagine prices for 2TB, 4TB and 8TB SSD configurations will double in the next MacBook Air and Pro generation - something that many consider is likely to happen. Being unable to carry over one's current SSD to the new hardware is really going to bite financially.
Typically users are not able to downsize their SSD requirments. Data has a tendency to accumulate, rather than decrease. The typical case is that the next hardware needs at least the same if not more RAM and SSD storage space than the previous.


It feels a bit like a perfect storm brewing.
RAM and SSD prices are doubling while the worldwide economy becomes fragile, people losing their jobs or fearing they might - which all will likely lead to scaled down investments.

People won't be willing (or able) to pay the price for the same size SSD in their new hardware.
And at one point they will likely start to demand that they can once again carry over their old SSD investments from their previous hardware.
Which Apple silicon does not allow.

If Apple refuses to decouple RAM and SSDs, they might ultimately start losing their higher-end markets.
But that's where all their high margins are...

What do other people think?

The ability to retain investments in RAM and SSDs might become a really important argument for Intel/AMD PCs in the near future.

 

[BSDnostalgia]

It feels a bit like a perfect storm brewing.

It is, right now. But, as industry makes adjustments to increase supply, and when the current huge uptick in capacity is satisfied, then, prices will come down again. IOW, a two-year survival strategy to get through the current high prices. Ten years from now, people will shrug their shoulders. I mean, do you remember the great disk drive shortage of, what was it, 2012-2014? I forget the exact dates. For users like me, it means foregoing a more convenient storage setup with everything on the single system drive. Oh well.

 

[Dreamail]

IOW, a two-year survival strategy to get through the current high prices.

Hopefully.

Yet many analytics point out that building RAM and SSD factories is not something that can be done in 1-2 years. It takes longer. And there are not that many players to begin with.
Most reports think that the availability situation will not improve before end of 2028, 2 1/2 years from now, from which point it will likely take another year until retail prices actually come down significantly.
Add to that current world economic issues, environmental disasters, wars, energy crisis, lack of petrol, etc. ... this time it may take 4-5 years. Or even longer.
We shall see.

 

[Flint Ironstag]

What do other people think?

The ability to retain investments in RAM and SSDs might become a really important argument for Intel/AMD PCs in the near future.

Don't give a damn what Apple does next right now. Going to load up on a ton of these 2019s that I can do anything with.

 

[Dreamail]

Don't give a damn what Apple does next right now. Going to load up on a ton of these 2019s that I can do anything with.

While holding out is honorable - what people often do not realize is the fact that the real issue is the web browser.

Once an OS is no longer upgraded, and Tahoe is the last macOS on Intel, within a year or two Safari will no longer be upgraded either. And then websites start to drop support for that version of Safari.
If you are lucky FireFox or Chrome might be getting updates for another year past that.
But the writing is on the wall, likely by 2028-2029 no later no current browser will work on that 2019 MacBookPro anymore.

And once web pages are rendered as white pages or all you get is "this website no longer supports your browser version - please upgrade" things start to get tough. Because any newer web browser will also require a newer macOS version. Which does not exist.
A Mac that is unable to visit a majority of websites, that can barely do web shopping is not very useful anymore.
Maybe Linux might help a bit, but if you are unable to move to Linux, your MacBook Pro will become obsolete.

Browser support is the hidden "built-in obsolence" these days.

Been there done that with macOS Mojave, which is the last supported macOS on some of my hardware...

 

[Frixo Cool]

While holding out is honorable - what people often do not realize is the fact that the real issue is the web browser.

I completely agree, the web browser is the weakest link. However, the situation is far from hopeless. Offering Intel users an always up-to-date web browser is a very nice niche, especially when you know that we still have about 50 million(!) Mac Intel users. That is not a negligible market at all.

If we consider that products such as OCLP (Open Core Legacy Patcher), which are extremely complicated and very low-level, exist for a much smaller group of users, it is almost certain that a software group will be found that will release an Intel-compatible up-to-date web browser. After all, as crazy as it sounds, there are groups of enthusiasts who offer it for PowerPC Macs too! Ok, the problem with them is that the slowness of the processors themselves has really caught up with them compared to modern Macs, but Intel will not have that problem - because if something can run decently fast on Windows, it will also run on Mac.

I especially don't see how the issue of speed can be a problem on Mac Pro machines with tons of cores and memory.

After all, we had a Playstation emulator once upon a time, it's not theoretically impossible to write an Apple SoC emulator either, of course it would run drastically slower, but even that might still be fast enough for relatively simple tasks like web surfing.

Always optimistic!

My 2 cents! 🙂

 

[Dreamail]

I especially don't see how the issue of speed can be a problem on Mac Pro machines with tons of cores and memory.

All good ideas.

Not sure how difficult it actually is, but I think security updates are the real pain in the neck.
It's easy to get a third-party browser mimic some modern browser ID to trick websites into thinking this browser is OK, but if these browsers cannot protect against malicious websites, are people be willing to use them?

Also people underestimate how many media files and other processes are running on average webpages these days. That is no simple feat. Many require a lot of CPU and RAM resources. Maybe not macrumors.com, but there are quite a few websites, like FaceBook, that are severe resource hoggers.

Will these really be OK on older Intel hardware?

 

[Luftkopf]

Don't give a damn what Apple does next right now. Going to load up on a ton of these 2019s that I can do anything with.

I'm curious, what do you do that makes a 2019 Mac even viable? You couldn't pay me to give up my M3 Pro for any 2019 Mac!

 

[Frixo Cool]

Also people underestimate how many media files and other processes are running on average webpages these days. That is no simple feat. Many require a lot of CPU and RAM resources. Maybe not macrumors.com, but there are quite a few websites, like FaceBook, that are severe resource hoggers.

Will these really be OK on older Intel hardware?

Yes, of course! All those webpages must work on Windows, right? Mac Intel hardware is not so different from PC, so if something works on comparable Windows Intel machine, it should work just fine on a Mac. Any Mac Pro tower should be more than fine.

 

[Frixo Cool]

I'm curious, what do you do that makes a 2019 Mac even viable? You couldn't pay me to give up my M3 Pro for any 2019 Mac!

No idea what Ironstag is using his Mac Pro for, but I am in multimedia production business and my machine with 28-cores, 32 GB of video RAM, 288 GB of ECC RAM and 50 TB of internal storage can do pretty much anything. Also, I enjoy RAID 0 array of 4 Samsung 990 Pro SSDs as a work drive. Only machine that can match that is Mac Pro 2023.

 

[Luftkopf]

No idea what Ironstag is using his Mac Pro for, but I am in multimedia production business and my machine with 28-cores, 32 GB of video RAM, 288 GB of ECC RAM and 50 TB of internal storage can do pretty much anything. Also, I enjoy RAID 0 array of 4 Samsung 990 Pro SSDs as a work drive. Only machine that can match that is Mac Pro 2023.

I guess I was thinking of MacBook Pros, which are severely limited by thermals, and are only competitive with Apple Silicon in highly specific circumstances. My friend's 16" i9 is not better than my 14" M3 Pro in anything other than screen size.

Tricked out Mac Pros can keep powering on, sure.

 

[rb2112]

But what am I going to use my $700 wheels for now?

mod them to be used on a Mac Studio

 

[Flint Ironstag]

All good ideas.

Not sure how difficult it actually is, but I think security updates are the real pain in the neck.
It's easy to get a third-party browser mimic some modern browser ID to trick websites into thinking this browser is OK, but if these browsers cannot protect against malicious websites, are people be willing to use them?

Also people underestimate how many media files and other processes are running on average webpages these days. That is no simple feat. Many require a lot of CPU and RAM resources. Maybe not macrumors.com, but there are quite a few websites, like FaceBook, that are severe resource hoggers.

Will these really be OK on older Intel hardware?

Are you serious? You think any non power virus website is going to be a problem for any Intel machine to render? Are you over 18?

I'm curious, what do you do that makes a 2019 Mac even viable? You couldn't pay me to give up my M3 Pro for any 2019 Mac!

I try to do everything that a fully supported Mac can do. I find the 2019 MP's ceiling to be very, very high. And once Apple drops it, the community will rally. This is a sublime platform to build on.

 

[Luftkopf]

Are you serious? You think any non power virus website is going to be a problem for any Intel machine to render? Are you over 18?

I try to do everything that a fully supported Mac can do. I find the 2019 MP's ceiling to be very, very high. And once Apple drops it, the community will rally. This is a sublime platform to build on.

Sorry, it was a faulty assumption on my part. I assumed laptops, and I would never trade in Apple Silicon for Intel, but Mac Pro makes more sense. There’s still plenty they’re good at!

 

[Flint Ironstag]

Sorry, it was a faulty assumption on my part. I assumed laptops, and I would never trade in Apple Silicon for Intel, but Mac Pro makes more sense. There’s still plenty they’re good at!

Fair enough. I have jumped the gun more than once. 😁

 

[Luftkopf]

Fair enough. I have jumped the gun more than once. 😁

It’s all too easy to do, we’re even in a thread about the Mac Pro and I still assumed laptop!

Anyway, I’ve long admired the Mac Pro, ever since my second hand G4 Power Mac showed me what Apple can do. I wanted a G5, then a trash can, and had hoped to get any Mac Pro one day. Hopefully second hand prices will allow me to get one some day. I have no need for one, but nostalgia is powerful.

 

[Dreamail]

Are you serious? You think any non power virus website is going to be a problem for any Intel machine to render? Are you over 18?

Yes, I think I am over 18...

As I had said before, I am speaking from personal experience.
I do have 2015 MacBook and MacBook Pro hardware, that only runs macOS Mojave as its last fully supported macOS.
And that version of Safari is no longer supported by most online shops, banking, movie ticket or flight booking websites, etc.
All I get is "please update your browser".

I can still use FireFox, as it has a limited "grace period" with minimal updates until the end of this year.
But I can assure you that certain websites, like FaceBook, have not been running successfully on FireFox under Mojave on those 2015 MacBooks for more than 1 year now. Some features on this website stall and crash FireFox. Not because of lack of RAM but because of lack of CPU power. FaceBook is a terrible CPU hog. But there are a couple of other websites too, it's not just FB.
And there are also a couple of websites that do not even work in FireFox anymore, despite it being a "current" and still updated browser.

Your milage may vary, of course, but extrapolating from my own experience I would assume that your 2019 Mac will start to have issues with some websites in 3-4 years no later. There is a built-in obsolence timer that is running...

You can extend it by using other browsers that may still work or by avoiding certain websites, but if for example your own bank no longer supports any browser on that macOS, it will be getting harder.

At the end it is not so much a question of the CPU power, but more whether the websites you want to use, still support any browser at all on that version of macOS.