How were MPX modules backwards compatible when GPUs and drive carriages for example had their own power supply lane? (non standard). You can't take an MPX GPU and put it in another PC.
Sorry, yes, I was referring to the slots, not the cards themselves. The cards were obviously proprietary to the 7,1 (they were dependent on its airflow too).
They got rid of MPX in the M2 Mac Pro for probably this reason.
MPX was intended for GPUs. Given the M2 didn't support PCIe GPUs at all, it would not only have been pointless, it would have caused confusion / disappointment if people had tried fitting MPX modules.
It's not interest, just over-engineered for no reason whatsoever.
I meant Apple lost interest in the 7,1 full stop. They had no incentive to beef it up with new GPUs, when they wanted its owners to move to AS Macs.
They could've at least gave us a 9xxx series drivers as a last hurrah for a dead product years ago but they didn't.
Yes, I agree 7,1 owners were shafted. I gave Apple the benefit of the doubt above, when I said perhaps the 7,1 took longer than expected to develop, and the conditions were right for the AS transition earlier than expected.
More realistically, Apple were well aware of the transition and decided to build the most powerful Intel Mac Pro they could, to tide pros over until the Mx Ultra was ready to take its place. Whilst AS CPU cores were performant from day 1, it took the Ultra a few generations to catch up to high end PCIe GPUs (and still can't match Nvidia's best). Plus, there would have been some concern regarding UltraFusion scalability and yields - the 7,1 would be a hedge against these.
Either way they lost a lot of customers in this niche product space after the 2013 debacle, and then by then the 2019 wasn't a feasible option. Most moved to Windows if they were doing anything 3D related for example.
I agree. Forcing an unpopular form factor, then sitting on it for years with no upgrades and no communication, understandably torched Apple's credibility in the workstation space. It probably was too late by 2019 - why would anyone trust them? Whereas everyone else has published, long-term roadmaps, Apple is famously tight lipped. Fine for consumer products, but not when people are trying to plan business purchases.
They just went "too pro" on the Mac Pro. Should've just made the case and made the whole thing as affordable as possible.
They went too expensive. The 7,1 was a luxury product. The case alone would probably cost $1K. It seems like since the 5,1, Apple can only be bothered with the Mac Pro if they have the chance of a design award. They refuse to just build a sensible workstation, like Lenovo or Dell - or like Apple used to.
The big issue on Apple silicon is the on-die RAM/GPU, they probably saw no need to make a new SKU to support RAM slots and GPUs, they would lose performance anyway losing data on the logic board's tracers.
It's not just the silicon engineering. It's that software would need to cater for two memory paradigms. Perhaps the OS could make this transparent. Even still, you would likely wind up with situations where a MacBook Neo was faster than a Mac Pro.
The G4 Cube was also Steve's but it was never supposed to replace the Mac pro desktop variant. It was underpowered and just mostly aesthetics. The G4 Cube is somewhere between a Mac Pro and a Mac Studio. 2013 is not his baby.
It's hard to say where the Cube might have gone if it sold well. It has mountings for a base fan, the VRM has unpopulated spots for additional phases, and hobbyists have squeezed up to dual 1.8GHz chips in them I believe (from a single 0.5GHz). It could be specced with a GeForce 3, which was a respectable card in its day. Still, it had no expansion slots, only one drive bay, and only space for a short single-slot GPU. In todays terms, its
perhaps a base Mac Studio.
After Steve passed, Apple felt some pressure to demonstrate they could still innovate. Schiller infamously unveiled the 6,1 as a riposte, not as the machine Steve had wanted to build.
All Tim Cook did was streamline the Mac product line more and gave birth to the death of the Mac Pro.
Cook famously does his work on an iPad (as CEOs can) and isn't really a computer enthusiast. I doubt the Mac Pro looks particularly exciting on the revenue spreadsheet, compared to say, sales of Lightning cables. He may also have been trying to do the 'visionary' thing - moving to the future that others can't quite see yet. Where desktop computers are dead, and we're all just swiping on glass (or God forbid, manipulating objects in AR).
What doesn't make sense to me is that they knew in 2019 that Apple silicon was in the pipeline and they still made that machine. It was basically obsolete by 2022 in many ways performance wise due to release of Mac Studio (with Ultra chip). A 3 year timeline is worse than the 6 year gap between 2013 MP and 2019 MP.
Yeah, it's almost like Apple can be a**holes.
