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Apple May Not Launch Updated Mac Studio With M2 Ultra Chip Due to Similarity With Upcoming Mac Pro
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Pity about the entire G4 era; amazing look and feel, horrifying cooling. They didn’t start to meaningfully solve that one until IBM’s monstrosity of a chip took over and they had no choice. The Cube certainly was a looker for its time, it would have been a much more positive legend if they’d just left it in the to-do pile for a couple more years.
Mac Studio feels like "give em something till we figure out how the PRO should be" thing.
The Max wouldn’t be that hard since it ready exists for the MacBook Pro, but the Ultra is likely more involved. Anyone interested in an M2 Ultra likely already has an M1 Ultra and would probably need a much bigger jump in performance to justify upgrading.
I did use the PCI slots in a 2002 Quicksilver, one slot went to a USB 2 card, and one to SATA card for a pair of hard drives. I kept that machine as my primary computer until 2009.
I have a 2010 Mac Pro with one slot used for a USB 3 card, and one for a NVME adapter for a fast "hard drive." It runs Monterey shockingly well.
The slots allow you to keep the machine useful longer. However you are right in that if you were trying to make money with the machines you wouldn't mess around with such measures. But most people are not video professionals. I also have a 2014 Mini (2.5ish GHz i5, bought used) set up as the file server. It runs the usual household stuff just fine, with Monterey. But what you have with that is all you will ever have except for a HD/SSD swap.
I agree that the Studio is a great machine, it's the only one Apple makes with enough USB ports to connect to everything.
Yep. Apple Silicon just doesn't need the cooling of a tower. The Mac mini is awesome and will likely outsell the Studio by a comfortable margin (it will certainly be more than enough for my needs since I'm using a 2018 mini right now). The Studio will meet the needs of most content creators and will sell in nice numbers. It will certainly meet the needs of photographers even of the highest level. And it will meet the needs of almost all the YouTube video editors. The Mac Pro will deliver something and I see it as targeted toward folks doing things like movie or TV show length editing. But mainly because those folks want tons of TBs of storage. I don't know how technically Apple gets the Mac Pro to have more RAM than 128gb or more GPUs than what you get by meshing two M2 Maxes together to form a M2 Ultra. And maybe Apple can't get beyond that point under current tech. But there will still be an audience for the Mac Pro.
Many here suggesting Apple are biding their time for one reason or another. Others saying a Mac Pro wouldn’t make them any serious money. Wouldn’t it be nice if they just wanted to produce a flagship device to fully demonstrate what they can do. Wouldn’t the richest company in the world with the engineers and the knowledge just want to do that? To not do it speaks volumes to me - mainly about profit being the only thing that matters. Innovation a distant second or maybe lower.
I honestly see this happening… the Mac Studio will be in awkward spot once the Mac Pro is released…
I don’t see the studio staying around to be honest.
I don’t see the studio staying around to be honest.
Nope. It fits in the price slot between a mini and a Mac Pro. You can just look at the prices of the Mini, the Studio and Mac Pro (which starts at $6,000). It is all pretty obvious. Without the Studio, desktop users that don't want an iMac would be deciding between taking a mini up to $2,000 and then having nothing to buy between that price and a $6,000 Mac Pro that would be overkill for editing and producing photographs or 10 minute YouTube content.
The Studio will be in a great spot for content creators who don't want to drop $6,000 for a Mac Pro since the Studio starts at $1,999 and has plenty of ports, plenty of power, and plenty of cooling for sustained loads for a huge portion of content creators.
This would be a big shame as it hits the spot as a great computer for many pro users.
I invest in PC towers for the churning for the studio. Much cheaper and runs all our software far faster.
ALL the pro graphics and CAD software we use is noticeably faster on the PC than Mac [adobe substance, fusion 360, rhino, unreal etc].
This is due to a lack of optimisation in the apps and Nvidia.
The macs are better for working with images and video, though, so are used at the start and end, but not the meaty middle.
We wont be buying Mac Pros. Unpredictable roadmaps, and not Apples priority. The MacBook Air and pro are their priorities, everything else just gets shoehorned the same chips.
While this might end up being true and would make the Studio a direct successor (in that regard) for the G4-Cube and TrashPro one has to ask it wouldn't make more sense to just cancel the MacPro >IF< the can't make it significantly better than a M2-Ultra Studio.
For anyone who doesn’t need PCIe slots, the Studio will be the cheaper and so preferred model. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an M2 Ultra Mac Studio alongside the M2 Ultra Mac Pro. Maybe they’ll allow expandable storage in the Mac Pro, there’s enough room for a ton of standard drives.
...and the result would be yet another tower workstation with the performance largely capped by the capabilities of AMD's latest GPUs, with no clear advantage over the Threadripper and Xeon systems already on the market. Having the CPU ARM-based rather than x86 based probably means it be more power-efficient than Threadripper - in a full sized tower system where power consumption isn't a big deal, and the GPUs are going to be burning hundreds of Watts anyway. The only real selling point of such a system would be that it could run the remaining - and rapidly diminishing - handful of Pro apps that aren't available on Windows or Linux... assuming that those get native ARM versions and still get optimised for AMD GPUs rather than Apple's tile-based GPUs, media engines, neural engines etc.
That may have been true 15 years ago, but is it still true? Things change. The Intel Mac years started with Apple as the poster child for the new Core-architecture chips (which were a major U-turn for Intel after they'd backed into their own thermal corner with Netburst) but as things progressed Macs were increasingly becoming PC clones with nice trackpads and a MacOS license (and trying to distinguish them by making them too thin to work properly didn't go well).
Today's "$2000 iPads and $4000 laptops" can take on many of the tasks that "pros" need to do which, in the past, would have needed a desktop workstation.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, if you need extreme processing power you can rent it in the cloud as and when you need it. The days of the super-powerful personal workstation may be coming to an end - and when it comes to high-density computing (either local or in the cloud) Apple hasn't had a dog in the race since they discontinued the XServe and won't unless they license MacOS on third-party hardware (which would probably wreck their business model in the personal computing market).
Apple Silicon has been transformative as to what you can achieve with an ultrabook or small-form-factor desktop, opened up some clear blue water between PCs and Macs (ignoring silly benchmark comparisons between MacBooks and brick-thick portable workstations/gaming laptops with 20 minute battery life) and Apple have a sweet system where they can power an iPad, a Studio Ultra or anything in between using just 2 permutations of die design. Not being able to make a Xeon-killer might be a price they are willing to pay.
As for any "trickle down" of development from the Mac Pro to the lesser Macs, so we can all run full-fat pro apps on our laptops, that's not going to be worth much if the MP-level apps are still optimised for threadripper-wannabe systems with AMD GPUs rather than Apple Silicon GPU + unified RAM systems.
They probably won't launch the Mac Studio upgrade at the same time as the Mac Pro, but Apple is certainly going to continue a well received product. It will just come down to the supply chain and when Apple is ready to move from the M1 Ultras.
I agree with this. Mac Pro to me is a marketing exercise. It needs to be a machine people lust over and show that apple can make powerful Machines for power users. Think of how formula 1 racing works. None of those companies make money directly from it but the marketing, research etc.. makes it worth it in the long run.
The thing I don’t understand is that apple is against modular computing as a principal. It’s spent the last decade combining separate computing functions into one chip. The logic seems to be the closer everything is the better speed they can get even if the individual process isn’t better than external processes. The bus speeds for memory etc and Lower use of power mean their chips on balance Beat everyone else’s.
But that logic doesn’t scale to the type of use cases very high end users will pay for. Apples anti modular designs are all about balance not brute power. So I’d be fascinated to see where apple goes here. PCI extended systems do not match well with apple silicons combined architecture. The gains are not there. And everything would need to be specialised to work with apple silicon. What GPU card makers (or any card makers) are going to do that?
My only guess is that if apple can create apple silicon that can be used in a modular fashion, can that be used to extend the system? i Think it could make sense for apple to make their own expansions based on customizing their chips and have a properietry expansion system. A bit like those old games consoles used to have. I think that could be a Mac Pro system people would pay for.
The Mac Studio feels more like the replacement for the iMac Pro, but acknowledging that most people buying that class of machine wants 2 monitors and to upgrade the CPU part faster than the monitor part. The Mac Studio uses not-cheap tooling to produce that unibody case with individually tuned ports. It doesn't make sense as a throwaway machine. If Apple wanted to do that they would have simply reused the Mac Pro that already existed.
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It all boils down to whether Apple wants to offer a competing product or not.
They could want to, to turn a profit, or to gain back the market share they lost in the last 10 years, or purely to show that they can, and to add an halo product to their lineup.
SoCs have matured a lot, 10 years ago they could make you browse the web, now they can power a Mac Studio, but it's not like the more dedicated hardware hasn't powered up in a similar fashion.
They are all made on the same production process, and there is no way to trick yourself that you can do with n transistors the same things you can do with 2n or 10n transistors all being made on 5nm or 3nm.
Will Apple do it? Highly unlikely, I know that, but it just means they have conceded a market rather than spewing out some nonsense according to which a SoC system can replace a Threadripper plus RTX5090 or something like that.
But could Apple do it? Of course they could. They have spent R&D in worse ways, like putting out the trashcan and the iMac Pro while they could have just speedbumped the 2006 Mac Pro all the way until 2020. They have the cash to do just about anything, and it wouldn't be the craziest idea.
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Apple sold a IIci/x alongside the IIx/fx for years. Also Quadra 800/900 and PowerMac 8000/9000 series.
I think it's better not to jump to conclusions. The rumors have never predicted niche Apple products very accurately since they have a smaller impact on the supply chain which is the source of most leaks. I'm pretty sure the Afterburner card didn't have any rumors prior to its release for instance. The speculation that Apple will release a Mac Pro with slots, but nothing to use them for doesn't bear out to history. If anything, it is likely a reason the Mac Pro was delayed. How hard would it have been to slap a Mac Studio in a different case after all?
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Yup, it would make also sense for them to drop the ultra studio completely. Update the max, it sits in between the mini pro and the mac pro, with the mac pro taking over the ultra spot
I love my Mac Studio, but I think it might end up like the G4 Cube: A one-generation-only machine.
So much attention has been put on the horse race at the performance ceiling that people have failed to see the significance of how much Apple has raised the performance floor. Any entry-level Apple Silicon Mac (even with 8gb ram) will be pleasantly usable for years to come. By contrast, HP is still willing to sell you a Core i3-based computer with a spinning hard disk, anemic RAM and not even enough power to keep up with Windows updates. Even their midrange up-speced i5 systems are molasses in comparison. I don't think I would have a second thought at installing the latest and greatest graphics or video editing software on a 2020 M1 MacBook Air in the middle of 2025 or later.
