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Nailed it! This has to be the product of the year. I was hoping Apple would reserve the Apple Wheels for mac Studio.
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Apple Executive Discusses New Mac Pro's Lack of Graphics Card Support
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I expect that is a conscious decision, considering how the 24" model bridges the gap between the 21.5" and 27" Intel models. The 27" iMac 5K was the most popular Mac desktop of the Intel years, the Apple Silicon Mac Studio and Mac mini Pro offer similar levels of performance and now when you upgrade them, you don't "throw away" the display, as well. So I think the "need" to annually upgrade the iMac is not there at the moment. I
t is also possible that supply chain issues caught the iMac out to the point that it was so close to M3's launch that Apple decided to wait and update it then and when M4 launches in 2025, the iMac will be there alongside the MacBook Air.
That is something that would appeal to the "enthusiast" market who bought the 2019 model (and the 2006-2012 before then) with the expectation of keeping the chassis around for a decade and upgrading the CPU, GPU and memory to maximize the RoI for a machine that they spent a bundle on.
But that is not the market Apple wants to address. Their sales data shows that the primary market for the Mac Pro is overwhelmingly enterprise customers who are on much shorter replacement cycles (effectively the 4-6 years of each Mac Pro refresh). So they are currently using 2019 models and will now replace those with the 2023 model with the expectation those will be replaced in 2027-2030 when Apple next refreshes the model.
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You mean this?
Dont ask me where I got them, I came from future when Mr.Cook ignoring PCIe slots entirely and getting M4 Extreme, but we no longer have Mac Studio.
I think I get where Apple is going. If you are going to do anything computationally expensive today, you don't do it from a GPU inside your box. You rent an A100 or 10 on AWS, run your code, get the data, then turn it off. I think I just came to the realization that local heavy lifting may have become obsolete and Apple figured it out before I did.
Based on media reports, Apple originally planned to offer an "M1 Extreme" SoC that harnessed the power and core-count of two M1 Ultras (and likely supported around 256GB of RAM). However, Apple could not make this SoC work at a cost-benefit ratio that made it worth putting into the market.
By then, the M2 family was likely well into development and Apple either took a second stab at an "Extreme" SoC with the M2 and failed, or decided that the chip just was not going to work on TSMC's 5nm process and therefore intended to offer it with M2 Ultra and had to wait for that SoC to be ready.
From what I have read, Apple Silicon is not designed to work with external GPUs. Apple has filed patents that imply they are considering adding this functionality to later generations of Apple Silicon, but even if they do, I would fully expect they would only support Apple GPUs and not third-party OEM models (AMD, nVidia, Intel, etc.).
Important to note that "Workstation" here includes laptops, desktops, all-in-one, and blade devices. It would be safe to assume that traditional desktop towers with lots of PCIe expansion make up 25% or less of these numbers. Given the Mac's ~8% of computer sales, that would leave the Mac Pro a theoretical market of about ~150k/yr, or something under .05% of Apple's total device sales by units. (Just Mac, iPhone and iPad sold more than 300mm units last year)
These workstations make up 2.62% of all PCs shipped annually.
So I multiplied that by how many Macs were sold in 2022
My assumption for annual Mac Pro + Mac Studio units shipped is 100k-200k/year.
80% of those are Mac Studio while 20% are Mac Pro.
20% of those Mac Pro are destined for those demanding CPU, GPU, eGPU and RAM upgradeability.
If I want those modularized features I'd be better supported by Dell, HP or Lenovo. They're better equipped to provide i9, RTX 4090 and other gamer PC parts.
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My thoughts exactly. They purposely did this because they want to kill the Mac Pro.
If you've honestly expected apple to add back any user expandability at any point since about 2012, have I got the perfect bridge to sell you! Seriously, what made you think they give a **** about you wanting to add more RAM later? Tim's Apple combines all the worst locked down "Magic box" tendencies of Steve Jobs, with the hyper profitable supply chain management and ladder sales/up-charging that has turned Apple from an Also ran computer company to the largest corporation in world history. They make 100s of Billions in profit by selling overpriced cellphones to hundreds of millions of people every year. Why would they care what a couple hundred thousand high end Mac nerds think or want? The Mac only still exists because iPhone users sometimes buy one and iPhone programmers need to use them.
What would an M1 Ultra Mac Pro without PCIE provide that the Mac Studio Ultra doesn't? Apple clearly wasn't going to offer an updated Mac Pro before PCIE could be provided. There was likely a plan to support more RAM, too, but the strategy failed.
But it doesn't have the same limitaitons at all. The trashcan had replaceable GPUs but no PCIe slots. This has PCIe but no replaceable GPUs, it's almost literally the opposite of the trashcan. With a trashcan, I couldn't add capture card or NVMe RAID or internal SATA disks or add Thunderbolt 3 ports when they came out. With the new pro, I could put add half a dozen 8k video capture cards, or 300TB of internal NVMe storage. Assuming they can be made to work with MacOS, things like 100gigabit networking cards can be added as well. This new Pro has a ton of flexibility, but it's only useful to super niche workflows, like all towers in the 2020s.
M1 Ultra probably did not yield enough to cover the demand of the Mac Pro.
It would be better to shorten one product line's waiting time than to lengthen it by splitting parts supply into 2 product line.
Alternatively Apple may have a unfinished contract with 2019 Mac Pro parts vendors like Intel.
I would be very satisfied if only the storage of the Macbook Pro become nvme M.2, but for that, they need to get rid of the PCI Controller that interfaces with NAND storage chips in the M chip.
Along those lines, my impression is that Apple viewed the move to Unified Memory Architecture as a route to high-performance, reasonably priced, energy-efficient computing, and the company knew support for TB quantities of RAM would be a struggle. And Apple had a strategy to support more memory, but the engineering didn't work out... which is okay because Apple's corner of that market has been small. (I would've bought in, though, and hope Apple hasn't totally given up.)
That's for when you want to roller-skate, and use two machines in parallel.
Still can't innovate!
The Mac Pro is for those who want a piece of art and can't be bothered to run dongles on their Mac Studio. Otherwise identical machines.
The Mac Pro is for those who want a piece of art and can't be bothered to run dongles on their Mac Studio. Otherwise identical machines.
Yeah, you will see a lot of "honest" bloggers, saying, that we must have it .... absolutely must, cause they so productive on it.
Actually Gruber was asking them specifically about AI and they just brushed that off like “the competition is better at that anyways, so we focus on other stuff.”
I think the pricing of this machine is revealing. It's designed for a very niche market who will pay the premium because they have PCi cards they cannot live without. For these people, money is less of an object.
Apple is moving in the right direction with SoC, in a few more years time the idea of a dedicated GPU will seem quite silly as the bus creates a significant bottleneck. Granted, there will always be special use case scenarios like massive amounts of data crunching, AI, etc, but its already a lot cheaper to buy the compute power off AWS or some other service provider.
Apple is moving in the right direction with SoC, in a few more years time the idea of a dedicated GPU will seem quite silly as the bus creates a significant bottleneck. Granted, there will always be special use case scenarios like massive amounts of data crunching, AI, etc, but its already a lot cheaper to buy the compute power off AWS or some other service provider.
I don’t understand this device that is supposed to be the highest-end professional workstation that now has handicapped RAM (7-8x less than before) with no upgrade path and no way to ever upgrade the GPU. And whatever happened to Thunderbolt eGPU that Apple was pushing?
I predict this thing is going to get killed off in a few years unless they are waiting for the M3 Extreme to do a redesign of the casing and positioning of what it is. Rumors were saying the M2 Extreme had issues and I feel like it’s probably due to scaling the architecture and die size. 3nm should help some, along with another year of development. If there is no M3 Extreme (or whatever it’s called, a doubled up M3 Ultra) then I think the Mac Pro is not long for this world.
I predict this thing is going to get killed off in a few years unless they are waiting for the M3 Extreme to do a redesign of the casing and positioning of what it is. Rumors were saying the M2 Extreme had issues and I feel like it’s probably due to scaling the architecture and die size. 3nm should help some, along with another year of development. If there is no M3 Extreme (or whatever it’s called, a doubled up M3 Ultra) then I think the Mac Pro is not long for this world.
Apple: Our new Mac Pro
Cutomers: define "pro"
Apple: the price. The price is pretty "pro".
Cutomers: define "pro"
Apple: the price. The price is pretty "pro".