Apple Silicon Mac Pro Reportedly Not Coming at WWDC, Mac Studio Refresh Likely Delayed Until M3

[Mr Rib]

But you are using "we" to mean "developers". Only a tiny portion of Apple's income comes from selling kit to developers - they make most of their money selling iPhones and Watches and iPads and MacBook Airs to consumers, and its no real problem from Apple if the developers use cloud services or buy Dell workstations as long as the consumers buy their iDevices and laptops to run the developers' products (and buy them through the Apple Store).

If they abandon "Pro" niche more power to them - but we are discussing a potential "Mac Pro" workstation in a "Mac Pro" threat so let's stick to that. So, it's either a Mac Pro workstation or a subject to ridicule, which it will be if they deliver it in closed architecture form factor. I don't see them opening it and embracing 3rd party GPUs - it would be against everything else they do at this point. If they do that I will be positively surprised and happy to buy it. Other option is creating their own standalone GPUs but lets face it - noone in the right mind would go that route for a niche product that constitutes 0.02% total product sale of the company
I think we can agree that without real GPU power, this Mac Pro would not be well suited for any visual work in 2-3 years - not only because of no 3D capability but also because of weak support of all the upcoming AI tools we will get in Adobe Creative Suite etc (there is NO other route of development for software companies - they have to embrace AI tools or become obsolete, and I'm not talking about stable diffusion but more about generative, procedural AI tools like the nVidia tools for game devs, AI up-resing, denoising, all the AI stuff you can do with motion picture which is a separate matter, etc etc).
So to sum up there is only one way - 2024 Mac Studio M3. And that should be it. No real R&D cost on Apple side, its sufficient for *some* Pro applications and all the rest will have to switch to Intel/nVidia combos.

 

[Allen_Wentz]

Dongles and docks cost more money than having a port on the board...

Clearly we disagree. Folks who reference having a port on the board are assuming that the port on the board happens to be the specific port that they want. The reality is that many different ports are needed, especially by higher end users; not just a port on the board. IMO what the device maker most needs to provide is throughput, i.e. maximum number of TB4 ports. Individuals can add dongles/docks as necessary to meet their own varying port needs

 

[Don Jose Luis Grijander]

The "AI revolution" will be delivered on mobile & embedded devices, for which Apple Silicon SoCs - with powerful on-die GPUs and neural engines - are not only ideal, but are already in the hands of millions of potential users.

Developing AI applications, training models, pre-rendering content and providing the server-side processing clout can happen on generic PC boxes stuffed with NVIDIA GPUs for all Apple cares. It's not like Apple services like Music/Maps/TV are being run from old xServes or racks of Mac Minis...

Yes but now nvidia has software demonstrating how graphical IA can help you in your workstation. This is huge for all content creators, which are an important part of apple silicon buyers. This is not only chatgpt and so, but drawing in your pc with the help of the IA, and at the moment Apple is out of all of this, while everyone with a PC and the latests nvidia cards can start to use this:

NVIDIA Studio | Built for Creators. Designed to Inspire.

Revolutionize your creative process with RTX-accelerated workflows and exclusive AI-powered tools.

www.nvidia.com

3d and IA help to music creation is coming also. This is huge.

Apple has created a very good chip for creators, with huge HW accelerators for codecs and it have some IA capabilities yes but no software and now the problem is that they do not have anything like nvidia tools, and if this sector will rely heavy on nvidia CUDA... what's is going apple to do if none of their computers can install an nvidia card? Are developers going to write software for their m chips with 8gb of ram?

This is going to be painfull for Apple in the long run bc if you are a content creator is very difficult to justify the spending on a machine that do not support this IA revolution due the lack of PCI. Also graphical IA is so heavy on RAM so 16gb is a joke, let alone 8gb. so creators are going to turn to PC with high memory and several PCI 5 slots where they could use this future tools and with the CUDA based software on it.

So they have invest huge on chips that probably cannot be used for content creation acceleration using IA, very small ram and no PCI expansion for IA cards.

 

[Realityck]

If Apple made a new class of ARM chip more like what that machine is using, I have no doubt it would destroy x86. But as long as they keep chasing the energy effiicient integrated GPU mobile type chips like the M series, they will be handicapped. That's another reason an M2 Mac Pro is insanely dumb and I just don't believe Apple will actually do that.

Seems the best path to the future is to broaden what a AS platform device can be used for. These first examples are toasters if one wants to think in the terms of future variance. Thats not to say the way Apple has approached this AS platform transistion is wrong. The SoC w/Unified memory's has been very successful meeting most types of usage. What we need to see is if Apple can show that some of their better products have some methods of improving upon its operation afterwards. Here's hoping WWDC surprises the heck out of us with some new product category introductions.

 

[Serqetry]

If they abandon "Pro" niche more power to them - but we are discussing a potential "Mac Pro" workstation in a "Mac Pro" threat so let's stick to that. So, it's either a Mac Pro workstation or a subject to ridicule, which it will be if they deliver it in closed architecture form factor. I don't see them opening it and embracing 3rd party GPUs - it would be against everything else they do at this point. If they do that I will be positively surprised and happy to buy it. Other option is creating their own standalone GPUs but lets face it - noone in the right mind would go that route for a niche product that constitutes 0.02% total product sale of the company
I think we can agree that without real GPU power, this Mac Pro would not be well suited for any visual work in 2-3 years - not only because of no 3D capability but also because of weak support of all the upcoming AI tools we will get in Adobe Creative Suite etc (there is NO other route of development for software companies - they have to embrace AI tools or become obsolete, and I'm not talking about stable diffusion but more about generative, procedural AI tools like the nVidia tools for game devs, AI up-resing, denoising, all the AI stuff you can do with motion picture which is a separate matter, etc etc).
So to sum up there is only one way - 2024 Mac Studio M3. And that should be it. No real R&D cost on Apple side, its sufficient for *some* Pro applications and all the rest will have to switch to Intel/nVidia combos.

I agree with everything you said, but I doubt Apple hasn't been making M2 Ultra chips already... so I think we'll see an M2 Mac Studio this year.

 

[Mr Rib]

Yes but now nvidia has software demonstrating how graphical IA can help you in your workstation. This is huge for all content creators, which are an important part of apple silicon buyers. This is not only chatgpt and so, but drawing in your pc with the help of the IA, and at the moment Apple is out of all of this, while everyone with a PC and the latests nvidia cards can start to use this:

NVIDIA Studio | Built for Creators. Designed to Inspire.

Revolutionize your creative process with RTX-accelerated workflows and exclusive AI-powered tools.

www.nvidia.com

3d and IA help to music creation is coming also. This is huge.

Apple has created a very good chip for creators, with huge HW accelerators for codecs and it have some IA capabilities yes but no software and now the problem is that they do not have anything like nvidia tools, and if this sector will rely heavy on nvidia CUDA... what's is going apple to do if none of their computers can install an nvidia card? Are developers going to write software for their m chips with 8gb of ram?

This is going to be painfull for Apple in the long run bc if you are a content creator is very difficult to justify the spending on a machine that do not support this IA revolution due the lack of PCI. Also graphical IA is so heavy on RAM so 16gb is a joke, let alone 8gb. so creators are going to turn to PC with high memory and several PCI 5 slots where they could use this future tools and with the CUDA based software on it.

So they have invest huge on chips that probably cannot be used for content creation acceleration using IA, very small ram and no PCI expansion for IA cards.

That's exactly what I'm saying. And this is just the beginning - simply nVidia was on top of things, but now Adobe has to follow suit and create AI assisted tools for both still and motion imagery - and there is so many tools to be developed. AI generative procedural image generation like nVidia does for game devs, denoising, up-res'ing, manipulating motion imagery, AI-assisted image recognition for video matte tools and all the other motion image applications where AI image recognition would be handy...
If we don't get a Mac Pro that is an open platform, what we get is:
A Mac Pro,
but don't use it with 3D apps like blender etc
but you can use it onle with *SOME* AI assisted tools
but only the ones that dont use too much GPU RAM
but remember the AI tools, if they do work, will be rather slow
etc etc

Too many "buts" for a true Pro machine. Pro machine should be versatile. It's not a pro machine if its only for youtube content creators...

 

[Allen_Wentz]

At this point, after waiting so long for a "pro" desktop, I kinda agree. Seeing how AI whether we want it or not is becoming a part of creative process, its hard to imagine a "pro" machine that doesn't meet the standards needed by AI applications - for instance some of them need a lot of graphic card memory (I'm not speaking strictly about image generation but AI in general - it uses graphic cards for its computations). Some of the new AI tech NEEDS nvidia chip - they don't run on anything else. And let's not forget how all of market is developing - nvidia is more and more connected to AI and declared their commitment to keep this route for foreseeable future. Soon pro apps will have a huge support of AI stuff like generative image up-res'ing, denoising and all that midjourney bs (which I hate ). So to sum up - if apple doesn't figure out a way to have a PCI port for a peripheral graphic card in their Mac Pro and make their M-whatever chips work efficiently with external graphic cards, it's no longer a Pro machine just because of this. It's already obsolete. From a perspective of a "Pro" machine, this was a stupid, narrow minded choice on their behalf - making an all-in-one chip, with dedicated graphic cores, completely ignoring what nvidia is doing. It's apparent they totally missed the AI revolution that is unfolding right before us - just like few other compenies did, including Alphabet (Google). THAT is the visionary aspect of a CEO that Tim Cook lacks. He's good with numbers, but Jobs would have seen it coming and would direct Apple development accordingly.
Considering the path they chose, maybe it's just better to leave the pro market than be a subject of ridicule. It's a niche market anyway. M chip machines are awesome for your everyday applications, including video editing. But it's not a future-proof machine and that's what one should expect from a "pro", expensive workstation. They committed to a certain architecture of M chips which is not suitable for cutting edge and future applications, unless they find a way to open the M chip ecosystem (I'm not a chip architect, I have no idea if that's even doable).
I wonder why noone is talking about this aspect of pro machines - maybe because youtube apple rumor bloggers don't know sh*t and just copy/paste stuff they read at twitter regarding next rumors, creating moronic content that contests their videos from just a few days earlier...
AI-powered processes in all our Creative Suites, color postproduction software, music production, video production, 3d / game dev is the future for a next decade. You NEED swappable graphic cards because thats their resource. Apple has to either pivot and create some open platform with a custom M chip or just abandon the true "pro" market and focus on nice web browsing laptops - which they have been doing for past several years.

You say
So to sum up - if apple doesn't figure out a way to have a PCI port for a peripheral graphic card in their Mac Pro and make their M-whatever chips work efficiently with external graphic cards, it's no longer a Pro machine just because of this. It's already obsolete.
and
You NEED swappable graphic cards because thats their resource.

But you forget that offloading work to graphics cards was something that evolved, and that PCI ports have their own performance limitations. The physics of Apple's Unified Memory Architecture is orders of magnitude above PCI ports. Let's see where Apple takes us rather than assuming that the existing energy-inefficient approach will remain superior.

 

[Mr Rib]

I agree with everything you said, but I doubt Apple hasn't been making M2 Ultra chips already... so I think we'll see an M2 Mac Studio this year.

If they do that, I don't know who is that for
Guys who own a Mac Studio are happy with what they have and they won't benefit from an upgrade.
Guys like me, who want a workstation that is relevant in, say, 2029, won't buy it because it makes no sense.
So I guess it will be a machine for youtube creators that didn't get to buy a Mac Studio M1...
Unfortunately you may be right and that is the product in the making. What I meant is that 2024 M3 Mac Studio is the only *sensible* option - but a non-sensible M2 Ultra Mac Studio along the way is quite probable

 

[falkon-engine]

Because the macOS without the other 20M/year other systems of the rest of the Mac line up isn't really sustainable. Mac Pro sales are likely two orders of magnitude smaller. macOS isn't an extremely large system segment to begin with. 0.9% of 10% is approximately zero in terms of whole percentage points.

The dubious assumption here is that this faction stripped off the rest of the mac line up is itself a viable collection of users. Likely looking at 100K/yr or less folks. Even if collected 5 years of those folks together (0.5M), you would still be in the less than 1M users zone. At the start of the transition there were 100M Mac Intel users supported. That number is shrinking. The number of Intel Mac Pro sales is not outstripping the number of Intel Macs falling onto the de-supported vintage/obsolete list each year. That won't change if Apple continued to sell a speed bumped Intel Mac Pro.

In 3-4 years the real base of system that viably support macOS on Intel is going to disappear. There is nothing a Mac Pro all by itself can do to fix that. It is a niche of a niche of a niche that is likely only going to get smaller over time.

macOS doesn't support over 64 threads so pointing at AMD/INtel SMT enable systems that blow past the 64 thread limit doesn't mean much. It isn't a commerically viable place for macOS to be anyway. [ Forking macOS on Intel even farther away from the Apple silicon version is only going to make the economies of scale worse ; not better. ]


3rd party GPU drivers very similar issue. Without the unit numbers of the dGPU used in MBP 15" and iMacs this is interesting to AMD how? The largest GPU vendor over last 10 years on Macs was Intel GPU and those got dumped right along with the Intel CPUs. The dGPUs on the Mac Pro was a "fall out" of the embedded dGPUs of other Mac systems. ( NVIDIA faded when they stopped getting embeded GPU wins. And sealed their fate by throwing gas on the fire and blowing up bridges behind them as they left. (e.g., "halt and catch fire" drivers decoupled from maintream macOS updates. )






Again ... economically viable how? Apple already have accelerators that don't need PCI-e v5. In fact, use a bus that is faster than PCI-e v5 ( in bandwidth and latency). So where is viable to build yet another accelerator with different and slower bandwidth/latencies for a diminishing smaller market? ( the scale on Apple's market crosses most of their entire product line; not just macs. )


Apple could perhaps sell a "Mac on a Card". A Mn Pro probably could fit on a 75W bus powered card.





If Apple added PCI-e slots internally they would have internal expansion. The drivers for that are already working (been working for years on macOS on Apple Silicon). Apple Silocon has PCI-e . It is more a matter of "how many lanes provision" than "do you have it". There are four x1 PCI-e v4 lanes now. Apple would need something like one , or two , x16 PCI-e v4 controllers to provision out decent bandwidth. That doesn't really require any Earth shattering, "moon shot complexity" changes to what they already have. A bit more work that will cost some more money. ( really need a more desktop oriented chiplets. But don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. )

Thrown and 'extra' x1 PCI-e v4 lane at a SATA controller and/or USB controller and can provision the 1-2 SATA/USB internal sockets the MP 2019 has. Again wouldn't be major change from what they have to do legacy interface internal storage expansion with the 'building blocks' they already have.


Intel, AMD , and Microsoft are trying to make "everything for everybody". Apple is not. Apple could cover more folks with some internal PCI-e slot provisioning. Not everyone , but more even if don't chase every possible hyper-moldularity option.

Where’s the source for how many threads the macOS kernel supports? And assuming what you’re saying is true, that macOS doesn’t support over 64 threads, with x86 core heavy server chips coming with good single thread performance, isn’t Apple at risk of getting left behind? For regular consumers like you and me, Apple silicon is enough. But for the crowd that would be interested in a Mac Pro in the first place, I’m not seeing a compelling reason to give apple tens of thousands when an x86 server box with Granite Rapids/Sierra Forest or Zen5 will slay. Apple doesn’t even support nVivia GPUs which are all the rave now with the AI craze these days.

I’m starting to believe perhaps its time Apple retire the Mac Pro. What’s the point, when a beefed up Mac Studio will do? Not sure anymore.

 

[Allen_Wentz]

Maybe building the entire platform around a SoC is the wrong idea. This is a serious problem and could cost them a small but extremely important market

Maybe building the entire platform around a SoC is the right idea. Physics suggests that it is.

There are always growing pains as one moves forward with newer, better tech.

 

[Mr Rib]

You say
So to sum up - if apple doesn't figure out a way to have a PCI port for a peripheral graphic card in their Mac Pro and make their M-whatever chips work efficiently with external graphic cards, it's no longer a Pro machine just because of this. It's already obsolete.
and
You NEED swappable graphic cards because thats their resource.

But you forget that offloading work to graphics cards was something that evolved, and that PCI ports have their own performance limitations. The physics of Apple's Unified Memory Architecture is orders of magnitude above PCI ports. Let's see where Apple takes us rather than assuming that the existing energy-inefficient approach will remain superior.

Too bad their integrated GPU cores make no sense in real world. They suck. Try using blender / ray tracing / unreal engine / anything that is RELEVANT in 3D environment development. We can talk spreadsheets all day, but what matters is real life performance. Apple sucks in 3D and now it will suck in AI as it uses the exact same resources as 3D graphics - simultaneous computations running in parallel. Not to mention some very cool applications are simply NOT available for M silicon - because they belong to nVidia. nVidia is way ahead of the curve on AI and procedural graphics, Apple by closing the system has cut itself out of the loop.
We already know where Apple takes us with a Mac Pro - to a make-believe world of a a PR stunt that they support Pro market It's not that they are unable to make a real pro machine - it's that they won't do it because it's economically not a good choice. They won't create a special, GPU-heavy M silicon just for Mac pro - too little money to make, too much R&D. They won't create GPU graphic cards - same reasons. The only chance is opening the system - which they won't do, because it will go against all their other products, they didnt cut the cord with Intel just to make a new one with nVidia. We are out of options. It's either new Mac Studio or a laughable, Mac Pro joke. Which they already have a history of making - trashcan Mac Pro, not updating Mac Pro for years, etc etc.

 

[Mr Rib]

Where’s the source for how many threads the macOS kernel supports? And assuming what you’re saying is true, that macOS doesn’t support over 64 threads, with x86 core heavy server chips coming with good single thread performance, isn’t Apple at risk of getting left behind? For regular consumers like you and me, Apple silicon is enough. But for the crowd that would be interested in a Mac Pro in the first place, I’m not seeing a compelling reason to give apple tens of thousands when an x86 server box with Granite Rapids/Sierra Forest or Zen5 will slay. Apple doesn’t even support nVivia GPUs which are all the rave now with the AI craze these days.

I’m starting to believe perhaps its time Apple retire the Mac Pro. What’s the point, when a beefed up Mac Studio will do? Not sure anymore.

Yup. They strayed away from Pro lineup long time ago, it's time to acknowledge that. Mac Studio is a capable machine for a certain group of people - like content creators. It's a huge market if you add "normies" who want a snappy desktop machine (no idea why they wouldnt buy a Macbook Pro instead but ok).
Their decision to create a closed system was good in a short, financial term and very bad in the long run. They underestimated AI development just like all the other big names in the game. Now they can reap the rewards of the closed system with the 99% of the market, and the 1% pro market will go with intel / nvidia. AI tools computing cost will be on the server side of things so it doesn't matter for non-pro applications.

 

[StellarVixen]

Since noone really knows what is going on inside the neural network, one can argue are there glimpses of actual understanding the world by ChatGPT4 or whether its purely probabilistic machine with no understanding of text its creating. This is debatable.

There is no room for debate, it is demonstrable that GPT and similar models don’t know a single thing about the world, and we have pretty good idea what is going on inside, what we don’t know is to describe the exact process by how it got the answer provided. However, take any complex equation solvable by computer which human would take long time to solve and same applies.

Also, which biggest AI specialists? How about people working in the field for decades, like Yann LeCun maybe? Or tech YouTubers and bloggers feeding people hype for clicks?

 

[Pezimak]

Gurman will probably be wrong. He’s not the most accurate on launch schedules. Good with specs though.

 

[Serqetry]

If they do that, I don't know who is that for
Guys who own a Mac Studio are happy with what they have and they won't benefit from an upgrade.
Guys like me, who want a workstation that is relevant in, say, 2029, won't buy it because it makes no sense.
So I guess it will be a machine for youtube creators that didn't get to buy a Mac Studio M1...
Unfortunately you may be right and that is the product in the making. What I meant is that 2024 M3 Mac Studio is the only *sensible* option - but a non-sensible M2 Ultra Mac Studio along the way is quite probable

Uhhh... Yeah, people who don't have a Mac Studio yet. The M1 is old at this point. Lots of people are waiting for an update before paying that much money for a Mac, myself included. I have a credit card waiting for the day Apple updates it, but I'm not spending that much money on an M1 this late when everything else has M2. I'd rather not wait for M3, we have no idea how long it will be.

 

[Pezimak]

Yup. They strayed away from Pro lineup long time ago, it's time to acknowledge that. Mac Studio is a capable machine for a certain group of people - like content creators. It's a huge market if you add "normies" who want a snappy desktop machine (no idea why they wouldnt buy a Macbook Pro instead but ok).
Their decision to create a closed system was good in a short, financial term and very bad in the long run. They underestimated AI development just like all the other big names in the game. Now they can reap the rewards of the closed system with the 99% of the market, and the 1% pro market will go with intel / nvidia. AI tools computing cost will be on the server side of things so it doesn't matter for non-pro applications.

Ws watching a You Tube video the other day of a world famous producer and DJ, they were in their home showing the making of a track, and they had all the kit and a Mac Studio. This was a real music pro and they used a Studio, not Pro Mac. Says it all I think. Plus at music festivals you see lots of DJs or bands use MacBook Pros. Seems it may be one market where they don’t need a Pro Mac anymore? I don’t know though and am only guessing, some musicians do seem to use a lot of add on cards to connect equipment to the Mac so use a Pro Mac.

 

[Serqetry]

Ws watching a You Tube video the other day of a world famous producer and DJ, they were in their home showing the making of a track, and they had all the kit and a Mac Studio. This was a real music pro and they used a Studio, not Pro Mac. Says it all I think. Plus at music festivals you see lots of DJs or bands use MacBook Pros. Seems it may be one market where they don’t need a Pro Mac anymore? I don’t know though and am only guessing, some musicians do seem to use a lot of add on cards to connect equipment to the Mac so use a Pro Mac.

The idea that the Mac Studio isn't good enough for "pro" work is very exaggerated. The Mac Studio is plenty powerful. If you're really dependent on a bunch of PCIe cards, time to either ditch Apple or more realistically, figure out a different workflow. AI with Nvidia GPUs is really the only area I think Macs just can't compete at all.

 

[caribbeanblue]

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

 

[Mr Rib]

There is no room for debate, it is demonstrable that GPT and similar models don’t know a single thing about the world, and we have pretty good idea what is going on inside, what we don’t know is to describe the exact process by how it got the answer provided. However, take any complex equation solvable by computer which human would take long time to solve and same applies.

Also, which biggest AI specialists? How about people working in the field for decades, like Yann LeCun maybe? Or tech YouTubers and bloggers feeding people hype for clicks?

If you begin a sentence with "there is no room for debate" in response, don't expect your interlocutor to be very eager to respond.. But here it goes: if a guy like Ben Goertzel who isnt exactly the biggest fan of LLM says "chatGPT in certain applications shows intriguing ability to generalise", is it enough for you to acknowledge there is some room to debate?
And no - we don't know what is going on inside the neural network, we know how it's built because we made it with layers of transformers, but how it operates - it's a black box (which we try to probe as far as I know but to little effect).

I don't watch youtubers and bloggers on technical, scientific matters - unless they are in a role of an interviewer / panel moderator. I'm only interested in what guys who work in the field have to say - and not all of them, for instance Sam Altman in my opinion is full of sh*t

It's possible ChatGPT's glimpses of understanding the world is a pure illusion just because the data its using is very general - and it's very well designed, trained and moderated with all the settings in terms of word prediction. But it is also possible it can generalise just a tad bit in its own, very limited way. I mean, some stuff it comes up with is pretty impressive and hard to imagine (but yeah, still possible) to be done with 0 understanding of the words it's saying.
There is no way to say that it definitively doesn't generalise - just as there is no definition of intelligence or conscience, as we have no definition of these two things either. Only propositions of it. Just like noone has a definite way to test if AGI is true AGI or if AGI becomes a sentient being.
I am not saying ChatGPT is sentient in any way or it has any kind of deep understanding of the world. It may have abstract glimpses of understanding. But considering the progress, it might become an important tool in AGI development.

 

[Mr Rib]

Ws watching a You Tube video the other day of a world famous producer and DJ, they were in their home showing the making of a track, and they had all the kit and a Mac Studio. This was a real music pro and they used a Studio, not Pro Mac. Says it all I think. Plus at music festivals you see lots of DJs or bands use MacBook Pros. Seems it may be one market where they don’t need a Pro Mac anymore? I don’t know though and am only guessing, some musicians do seem to use a lot of add on cards to connect equipment to the Mac so use a Pro Mac.

Yup. I think they should just keep updating Mac Studio with the newest silicon and that's it. I heard with enough tracks Mac Studio chokes in music production - but that's probably relatively low percentage of people using it. The small, tiny, niche market of guys who want something extra should go intel/nvidia route - the rest will be very happy even with a Macbook Pro for that matter. VJs, DJs, majority of producers/illustrators/graphic designers, a lot of motion guys. The dissatisfied ones should be some people in motion design, all 3d guys, all game devs, most animators (both 3d and 2d considering AI tools to come), probably some graphic designers too.

 

[theorist9]

Time to move back to x86 already?

Why not just stuff an Epyc Genoa 96-core monster with an rdna3-based monster GPU with maybe an apple silicon accelerator for encoding and neural engines and other tasks and be done with it?

Why does the Mac Pro need to be apple silicon based if it doesn’t do memory expansion or pcie expansion properly?

IMO those would be bad moves for Apple:

1) In putting the Macs on Apple Silicon, Apple is pursuing both horizontal and vertical integration. Adding the Macs to AS integrates the Macs horizontally with the rest of their products. And it gives them vertical control over most of the Mac hardware stack. Putting the MacPro on x86 would be a step backwards.

2) Going back to x86 is inconsistent with their push towards greater efficiency.

3) Going back to x86 would require them to continue to support two separate platforms for a very small slice of the market.

4) While the MacPro's market is small, its visibility is high—it's their HALO product. It would be a marketing disaster to have their HALO product be based on a tech they are competing against everywhere else. It would be like GM manufacturing the Corvette using the engine from the Ford Mustang.

I'd rather wait and see what they are able to do with AS for the Mac Pro. That's far more interesting than just using someone else's processor.

 

[Mr Rib]

The idea that the Mac Studio isn't good enough for "pro" work is very exaggerated. The Mac Studio is plenty powerful. If you're really dependent on a bunch of PCIe cards, time to either ditch Apple or more realistically, figure out a different workflow. AI with Nvidia GPUs is really the only area I think Macs just can't compete at all.

The problem here is the near future, not our current day. I mean noone in current economy is eager to drop x xxx - xx xxx USD (Mac Pro) or even x xxx USD (Mac Studio) on a workstation knowing it MIGHT be obsolete in 2 years right? Nvidia will keep developing new toys for creators and Adobe will follow suit - and we have no idea how these AI tools will work on GPU-bottlenecked M silicon. We know how sh*tty the expience is with 3D, and AI tools will run similar, parallel calculations. That's the reason I don't want the Studio and most likely a Mac Pro with closed GPU end is also not a safe bet. On the other hand, I really don't want to leave Mac OS ecosystem. I hate Windows

 

[DavidSchaub]

The problem here is the near future, not our current day. I mean noone in current economy is eager to drop x xxx - xx xxx USD (Mac Pro) or even x xxx USD (Mac Studio) on a workstation knowing it MIGHT be obsolete in 2 years right? Nvidia will keep developing new toys for creators and Adobe will follow suit - and we have no idea how these AI tools will work on GPU-bottlenecked M silicon. We know how sh*tty the expience is with 3D, and AI tools will run similar, parallel calculations. That's the reason I don't want the Studio and most likely a Mac Pro with closed GPU end is also not a safe bet. On the other hand, I really don't want to leave Mac OS ecosystem. I hate Windows

I'm sure everyone will be upping their AI game as we go too.

Apple's approach will have some advantage over Nvidia's regarding the amount of RAM Apple's AI cores will be able to use.

The kicker is, if you want Nvidia GPU/AI hardware: give up on Macs and go somewhere else. If that's what you want, or care about, Apple doesn't care about you.

 

[theorist9]

If you're really dependent on a bunch of PCIe cards, time to either ditch Apple or more realistically, figure out a different workflow.

This makes no sense to me. There's no reason to expect the MacPro won't have several PCIe slots, since there's nothing that's incompatible between them and Apple Silicon.

Plus there have been no rumors or other indications that it won't have PCIe (and a few that it will).

In any case, the AS MP isn't even out yet, so I'd wait until it appears before making such strong statements.

 

[Serqetry]

This makes no sense to me. There's no reason to expect the MacPro won't have several PCIe slots, since there's nothing that's incompatible between them and Apple Silicon.

Plus there have been no rumors or other indications that it won't have PCIe (and a few that it will).

In any case, the AS MP isn't even out yet, so I'd wait until it appears before making such strong statements.

What makes no sense is that Apple would release a Mac Pro that has nothing going for it over a Mac Studio except some PCIe slots that don't support GPUs, which is where the dumb rumors currently stand. No one's going to buy a Mac Pro that can't be upgraded, can't use GPUs, and can't even be ordered with more than 128gb of RAM.