Apple Silicon Mac Pro Said to Feature Same Design as 2019 Model, No User-Upgradable RAM

[Lord Snooty]

The upcoming high-end Apple silicon Mac Pro will feature the same design as the 2019 model, with no user-upgradeable RAM given the all-on-chip architecture of Apple silicon.

In his latest Power On newsletter, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has revealed that Apple's upcoming Mac Pro, which is the final product to make the transition to Apple silicon, will feature the same design as the current Mac Pro from 2019. Unlike the current Intel-based Mac Pro, the upcoming model will also not feature user-upgradeable RAM.

Gurman has reported that Apple has canceled plans to release a higher-end model of the upcoming Mac Pro with 48 CPU cores and 152 GPU cores given its high cost and likely niche market.

Article Link: Apple Silicon Mac Pro Said to Feature Same Design as 2019 Model, No User-Upgradable RAM!! They’ve gone and done it again!

The upcoming high-end Apple silicon Mac Pro will feature the same design as the 2019 model, with no user-upgradeable RAM given the all-on-chip architecture of Apple silicon.

In his latest Power On newsletter, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has revealed that Apple's upcoming Mac Pro, which is the final product to make the transition to Apple silicon, will feature the same design as the current Mac Pro from 2019. Unlike the current Intel-based Mac Pro, the upcoming model will also not feature user-upgradeable RAM.

Gurman has reported that Apple has canceled plans to release a higher-end model of the upcoming Mac Pro with 48 CPU cores and 152 GPU cores given its high cost and likely niche market.

Article Link: Apple Silicon Mac Pro Said to Feature Same Design as 2019 Model, No User-Upgradable RAM

Whoaaarrgh!! They’ve gone and done it again!! Not content with pissing the pro market off until 2019, they’re now going backwards. Seriously, we need better than this when asking such premium prices for far-too-long-awaited high-end workstation kit. This could be the deal breaker that finally sends loyal pro folk off to the PC camp for good. Maybe that’s what Cook’s Apple wants…

 

[nebojsak]

The fact that smaller foot prints and lighter products that provide the same power for high end users, should be a nice welcome for most people.

And we compensate that with tray-sized phones.

 

[TonyTech]

Why would the form factor be so large if it is basically a Mac Studio on steroids?

Full-length PCI expansions?

 

[Marinna]

Being a Mac Pro customer for 14 years, it seems to me that Mac Pro is a concept fundamentally incompatible with Apple. They are again falling back to the failed trash can practice... (People don't spend $10K and replace their desktop every 3~4 years like Macbook users)

In the same time, while my 2019 design is slightly aged and behind Apple Silicon performance, it still have ample enough of room for update. I'll just wait for the used top-tier GPU cards get back to the market and cheaper DDR and SSD by day.

 

[compwiz1202]

"...no user-upgradeable RAM"
After two decades of owning macs I am thinking more and more of going back to a windows machine for this reason.
Who wants to pay inflated prices for ram?

Haven't used a PC Desktop in forever, but lately the laptops have been much worse for upgrading. Used to just take out a few screws, pop the panel, upgrade, go in reverse and done in less than five. Now you have to take the whole bottom of and possibly remove other things to access RAM and SSD Are there any PC that are soldered yet?

 

[Unregistered 4U]

What a crock, They design the board, They could easily put replaceable features on the board, especially a PRO Product. But What's more important? THEIR PROFIT, Not the Consumer Benefit. Remember that, It's what's best for THEM not YOU.

They could easily charge $4 for them, too. Heck, they could easily give them away for free. A LOT of things are easy when the goal is not “be around next year in order to make and sell more products”. In fact, I’d guess that, for any company that’s not a non-profit, profit is what they exist for.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

they make far more money on laptops so they prioritise those then fudge the components to use in desktops?

Sounds about right. A penny spent on a desktop is a penny spent on a product that will sit on the shelves weeks, maybe months later.

 

[mansplains]

A lot, if the computer can "only" reach 128GB.
The actual Mac Pro can be upgraded with up to 1.5TB of RAM.

I forgot that the Mac Pro can go that far, for another $25k stateside, max price of $50k+ is nuts too. What types of workloads necessitate that much RAM? I'm genuinely asking as it sounds cool, if anyone knows. Not arguing "no one needs that" or "devs need to optimize their software" or anything.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

"...and [spaces] for graphics, media, and networking cards."

Exciting. Looking forward to see how that is handled and what the performance is like.
Could Nvidia support be back on Mac?

Not unless their developer account is renewed. Which likely won’t happen because NVidia requires kernel extensions that are no longer allowed in macOS, so they won’t trying to have it renewed. I mean, there’s a lot of other reasons, but that’s a big one.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

If the 2023/2024 Mac Pro doesn't have an option with a ton of cores, and doesn't have an option for a ton of user-upgradable RAM, that is a deal breaker for me. I'll just stick with my 2019 Mac Pro, which I love, and which should keep working for many years to come. I used my 2008 Mac Pro (the older Octo-Core!) for a long long time.

This is likely why it won’t have options for a ton of cores or user-upgradable RAM. Folks that need that in a Mac VERY likely already have it and that solution will continue working for many more years.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

Everyone I know with a Mac Pro ditched Apple and went the PC route & didn't look back It's almost like Apple doesn't want the "Pro" business which probably isn't too far from the truth. They would rather focus on releasing hilariously overpriced consumer Macs instead.

The only Pro business they want are the pros that need Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro. Other than that, folks that have moved away from Apple have found themselves in a much more performant place AND no longer caring about whatever the heck Apple is doing. I kinda think that second thing is actually more important as it breaks that emotional connection they had with Apple that had them in a generally surly mood (my experience from the folks I’ve helped migrate from Apple)!

 

[jakey rolling]

With the original all-USB iMac, for example, Apple said "tough luck, it is over" to people with an investment in printers with Centronics parallel printer ports, or peripherals with serial DIN connectors, etc. (Such gall! Call the cops!)

As a Mac salesman at the time, I loved this transition. Margins on iMacs were super low, but adapters always had very high margins. USB to ADP, USB to Parallel and USB floppy drives were a hot commodity for quite a few years after the iMac came out. Man were Apple users grumpy, though.

The fact that Microsoft took several years to make “standard” Windows be Windows NT isn’t admirable and “for the convenience of customers and developers alike,” it’s just slow and incompetent — and risk averse.

What does that make Apple then? Microsoft had Windows 2000 out and compatible with most home PC software while Mac OS X was still in beta. When Windows XP came out, very few PC users had to worry about whether their software would run properly on it - almost everything did on day 1. The conversion to Mac OS X, on the other hand, was quite long and painful, and some very key software took years to make the transition (while some never did).

Meanwhile, PC owners were out buying “How To Install An Ethernet Card and Install its Drivers For Dummies” books.

Yes, those were trying times. Step 1) Plug the card in the slot. Step 2) Insert the CD into the drive. This, of course, ignoring the fact that many broadband providers at the time were already providing PC users ethernet cards and free installation services as part of their standard installation packages anyhow. So the real steps were "Step 1 - call the Cable company and say you want to sign up for broadband."

 

[Aggedor]

That performance is limited though, Intel and AND have already surpassed Apples CPU, now sure you can make the argument if power consumption, but that argument collapses when talking about the Mac Pro and it’s target audience, you’ll buy it and think it’s the best thing, but later that hear in the hear after Intel and AMD will surpass it in general performance. For less probably AND be user upgradable.

Macs now seem to target specific pro uses only, a PC can be made for any Pro use.

As for GPU’s, let’s not even go there as Apple will be embarrassed by AMD and Nvidia and Intel too soon. And you can upgrade their GPU’s as you go. People have been fitting high end AMD and Nvidia GPU’s in their cheese grater, old and new, Mac Pros for a while, well that idea will be gone with this new Mac Pro and you’ll be stuck with what you bought. The new Mac Pro sounds like a glorified laptop really.
I think the Studio is a great machine, it’s small and power efficient so it gains that advantage of using Apple silicon, but a Mac Pro in the same size as the current one? With the exact same limitations as every other Apple Silicon Mac for no doubt thousands? IMO Apples platform quickly loses its attraction then.

Personally I hope to finally get around to buying a new computer this year, despite my love of the iMac design, I’ll end up with a Studio, after it’s upgraded to the M2 chip. Should last me a fair few years then. I am so split on PC of Mac, but I really don’t want Windows outside work lol. Too engraved in Apples eco system these days.

Oh yes, you are entirely correct. I was just pointing out that there will never be GPU cards that will work with AS, because AS is not designed that way.

Which means... do Apple even need to go back into the pro space? They have portable pro power (MacBook Pro), and the Studio (pro enough for most "pro" use), but the high-end, true pro market was lost to Windows long ago, so why do they even feel the need to pursue it, I wonder?

 

[jakey rolling]

It is quite normal that there is ECC-Ram in real workstations. Just like in servers.

HP Z8 G5 Desktop Workstation

The Z8 G5 offers more CPU performance than ever before, in a classic dual-socket design, to accelerate rendering with real-time ray tracing and data visualization.

www.hp.com

HP Z4 G5 Desktop Workstations

Tackle advanced workflows—from rendering and simulation to advanced video editing and massive dataset preparation.

www.hp.com

Yes, that is true. Because ECC does offer some benefit to workloads where extreme accuracy is required (such as CAD or scientific applications). Photoshop, Logic, ProTools, Maya, Excel, Word, InDesign... none of these benefit whatsoever from a system with ECC RAM.

HP and Dell both offer workstations with Xeon/ECC and with Core i-Series and Non-ECC options for this reason. Apple offers only Xeons for the simple fact that they are able to pad their margins and then point to the most expensive workstations in the world and say "look - we're the same price as those over there" and distract Mac users from the fact that they are paying extra for a load of tech that they can't even take advantage of.

It was always about differentiation. It was never about performance.

 

[jakey rolling]

People are doing online banking on all of their devices. That alone suggests that ECC should be everywhere. Why not prefer an ECC error message over a random crash or silent data corruption?

ECC is already used by all online banking apps, given that the calculations are happening on the Banks' servers, and not on your iPhone.

 

[Velli]

I'm a computational scientist. My current 2019 Mac Pro has 1.5 TB of RAM and, of course, I purchased the RAM from a third party. My computations often fill the full 1.5 TB of RAM. It is chugging away on 40 computational tasks for a week (right now) and the RAM is almost full throughout the computation. For context: I setup jobs on my Mac Pro, test them extensively, and then batch out thousands of jobs on our high performance computing cluster once I am sure everything works well.

If the 2023/2024 Mac Pro doesn't have an option with a ton of cores, and doesn't have an option for a ton of user-upgradable RAM, that is a deal breaker for me. I'll just stick with my 2019 Mac Pro, which I love, and which should keep working for many years to come. I used my 2008 Mac Pro (the older Octo-Core!) for a long long time.

Just my two cents.

I would love for someone like you to run tests, on a smaller scale of course, on an M1/2 Macbook vs an Intel with 4x the ram. My 8GB M1 is eating my 16 GB Windows machine for breakfast, and I never once had a feeling I was limited. But, I am also very much a “casual user”. All the people telling me I was foolish to not get 16 gigs were flat out wrong.. for my use. I wonder how that translates to heavy use.

 

[jaw04005]

Sounds about right. A penny spent on a desktop is a penny spent on a product that will sit on the shelves weeks, maybe months later.

Apple has gotten very good with JIT inventory. Mac Pros don't sit on shelves because they don't produce enough of them to sit on shelves. As far as I know, it's the only Mac assembled stateside (Texas?) too.

It's a niche, but important product for Apple.

The day they get rid of the Mac Pro is the day they start transitioning the the Mac product line to iOS.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

so why do they even feel the need to pursue it, I wonder?

Like everything else, because they see a profit in it. There’s exactly zero professionals running Final Cut Pro or Logic Pro on their Windows boxes, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon.

 

[DavidSchaub]

I have doubts the M2 Max in the laptop is going to be the sole basic building block for the M2 Ultra. Especially if the Ultra is picking up substantially enhanced PCI-e lane provisioning. Pretty good chance the PCI-e provisioning is off on another chiplet that just won't be present at all in the laptop deployment.

I think this is the most interesting question, and I both agree and disagree with the quoted conclusion.

So far, Apple has seems pretty focused on only have two chip designs on the Mac: the M* and the M* Max. Given the puny size of the Mac Pro market, this seems like a wise move. Apple having just two wafers that scale all the way from the MacBookAir to the MacStudio has been impressive. Clearly the 4x M* Max scaling has not gone as planned, but I doubt Apple will entirely change their approach yet.

So I would expect the M2 Max on the laptop and the Mac Pro to be the same.

But where I do agree is: I could imagine Apple making a PCIe bridge chiplet on package to do the PCIe breakout, most likely connecting directly to their "Fusion" interconnect rather than to the limited I/O on the M* Max.

The 2019 Mac Pro was already under-provisioned for PCIe, and I expect that will continue and probably get worse.

 

[reviewspin]

The upcoming high-end Apple silicon Mac Pro will feature the same design as the 2019 model, with no user-upgradeable RAM given the all-on-chip architecture of Apple silicon.

In his latest Power On newsletter, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has revealed that Apple's upcoming Mac Pro, which is the final product to make the transition to Apple silicon, will feature the same design as the current Mac Pro from 2019. Unlike the current Intel-based Mac Pro, the upcoming model will also not feature user-upgradeable RAM.

Gurman has reported that Apple has canceled plans to release a higher-end model of the upcoming Mac Pro with 48 CPU cores and 152 GPU cores given its high cost and likely niche market.

Article Link: Apple Silicon Mac Pro Said to Feature Same Design as 2019 Model, No User-Upgradable RAM

This makes no sense. At this point, why even have a Mac Pro? If you can't upgrade the CPU, the RAM then just make the Mac Studio as the high end Mac and discontinue the Mac Pro.

We don't want Trashcan 2.0.

At least this means we're not getting Trashcan 2.0.

No, that is exactly what this is.

"I don't hear our users asking that we put a lot of energy on that at this point"
- Tim Cook

Thats the thing. They actually DID hear this from their consumers with the Trashcan, and now they are doing this all over again.

 

[Pezimak]

Oh yes, you are entirely correct. I was just pointing out that there will never be GPU cards that will work with AS, because AS is not designed that way.

Which means... do Apple even need to go back into the pro space? They have portable pro power (MacBook Pro), and the Studio (pro enough for most "pro" use), but the high-end, true pro market was lost to Windows long ago, so why do they even feel the need to pursue it, I wonder?

Totally agree, when they launched the 2019 Mac Pro, they sent it to the famous Apple You Tube channels to ogle over, so one use case only which was video editing, that was the way it was first reviewed. A clear example of what they wanted the target market to be. A specific use case.
But there are rather a lot more ‘pro’ use cases than video editing for computers. But as you said most have ditched Apple for PC’s now.

I guess they think enabling faster 4K or 8K editing is important? Media and television outlets seem to like using MacBook Pro’s, I’m not so sure they’ll buy into a Mac Pro that’s essentially the exact same with more power and two or three times the price, but with no upgrade path.

They should stay out of the general Pro space, offer the machines at specific targets like photo, video, music. With a bit of 3D modelling on the side, which could be served by the Studio, leave the rest of the Pro space to PC’s.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

Apple has gotten very good with JIT inventory. Mac Pros don't sit on shelves because they don't produce enough of them to sit on shelves. As far as I know, it's the only Mac assembled stateside (Texas?) too.

Yes, Mac Pro’s are JIT, but I’m including the desktop iMacs in that as well. Customers are more and more interested in being able to take their data with them, many even preferring devices that come with their own cellular internet connection (at a rate higher than all Macs combined).

So, it makes sense that the focus is on where the revenue is coming from, in the mobile space, then just use an iteration of that for the desktop space.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

They should stay out of the Pro space, offer the machines at specific targets like photo, video, music. With a bit of 3D modelling on the side, which could be served by the Studio, leave the rest of the Pro space to PC’s.

Well, it’s not like anyone else is going to offer a high performance system that runs Logic Pro or Final Cut Pro.

 

[gagaliya]

You guys are being unreasonable, what do you want apple to do here exactly, the apple silicon design is soc, do you want apple to hack this just so you can upgrade memory later.

apple and m chip has brought the high end processing order of magnitude better vs what intel has, both in term of $ per processing or watt usage. With studio having m ultra it should satisfy majority of mac pro users at a much smaller footprint and $, it IS the old mac pro replacement but way better.

The new mac pro will be a very niche product only for people who truly need the expansions or ability to swap drives. I am sure they will give the mac pro more memory and storage options to differentiate from mac studio. So stop complaining, or do you rather we be stuck with the new intel egg frying cpus so you can have the option to upgrade your precious memory later, which most of you will never do anyway.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

So stop complaining, or do you rather we be stuck with the new intel egg frying cpus so you can have the option to upgrade your precious memory later, which most of you will never do anyway.

For some it’s “I want to run a benchmark and see it posts a higher number than my Intel owning friend” and that will be the most extensive use that chip ever sees.