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

[Unregistered 4U]

The Macintosh II was effectively an early Mac tower. It's just that the case was designed horizontally to sit on a desk rather than vertically to sit on the floor and it offered nubus instead of PCIe for expansion slots.
The iPod touch and then ultimately the smartphone which is ubiquitous means everyone already has an iPod in their pocket!

Yes, but I don’t have anything that will run my 5.25 Apple II discs. I skipped the IIGS because I assumed that a company would be able to come up with another better replacement later. Still waiting! Plus, waiting for that updated LaserWriter. Also waiting for an updated Airport Express router now that I think about it. And, a regular old iPod, I don’t need it to have wifi/cellular/touchscreen, just a headphone jack.

It seems that Apple can’t “make a profit, keep all their staff and still produce products that are in line with the model they replaced” because there’s a LOT of things that Apple just haven’t replaced.

 

[jaw04005]

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.

The focus is on whatever product needs the focus at the time. iPhone will always remain the company's primary focus because it's the product leader. The rest of Apple's attention tends to shift from iPad, Mac, Apple Watch etc.

However, I'd argue Apple is doing everything in its power to keep the Mac line relevant. They didn't have to produce a desktop or portable chip. They did so because Macs remains part of their core mission.

Steve Jobs had a great quote back in the 2000's. Paraphrasing he said Apple only had the ability to focus their marketing dollars on a few products per year. So, even though they still had other great products, the public's attention span was short and selecting the right products to showcase was important.

Looks like Apple is hoping to wow the world with their AR headset in 2023 and as it seems it's gonna be a rather boring year for their traditional line up

2023 is giving me 2006—2008 vibes where most of the company's attention was on the iPhone. However, Apple did manage to ship some sleek, new designs including the first MacBook Air during that era. So, we may be in for more in 2023 than it appears.

I shudder to think what would’ve happened had Apple gone with simply grafting “Modern OS features” onto OS 9. I’m not sure we’d even be talking about a company named Apple at this moment.

This was not going to happen. If you look back at Apple operating system history, Apple had already developed Mac OS to run on top of UNIX. It was a shipping product (primarily aimed at research and servers).

A/UX - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

And then there's Copland, which was ambitious but became a complete development disaster.

Copland (operating system) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Apple's problem back then wasn't the lack of desire to create a modern OS. It would have gotten there.

Apple's problem was it didn't have a leader.

 

[ssgbryan]

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.

You have a lot more confidence in the bean counter than I do.

I'd rather have a Threadripper based Mac Pro - that is doable.

That being said, I now have a faster, cheaper, and more productive Ryzen based system. I thought I would miss my Mac Pro, but nope.

I like having the ability to drop multiple GPUs into my system to boost my rendering.
I like having the ability to upgrade my CPU as new models become available, rather than dumping an entire computer.
I like having the ability to add additional PCIe cards to my system to expand functionality. (12Tb of internal SSD storage is a wonderful thing).
I like having the ability to run any piece of software I need to accomplish what I am attempting to do.

I like not having to guess & datamine the forums to see if a product will work with my computer.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

This is exactly what the report says, from Bloomberg.com.

" Still, there are two SSD storage slots and for graphics, media and networking cards."

Originally I read that we can only swap out or add additional SSD's, but as someone pointed out, they must be talking about PCIe slots. And since they are specifically mentioned graphics, media and networking cards, and discussing this report, that is what I am going by.

Absolutely, go by that! It’s just a rumor that may or may not have a basis in fact, could be driven by a need for ad revenue (and for folks to post their links driving further revenue) but there’s no harm in going with it. Unless you, I don’t know, make a BET on it or in some other way attempt to materially alter your current situation based on this information (which may or may not be accurate).

Because, in 6 months, no one will care that Bloomberg got this wrong. Not even Bloomberg will care as they KNOW they get things wrong sometimes (like the Big Hack”). If news comes out that they’re wrong, I may even have forgotten that I made this post. When I‘m watching WWDC presentations for Apple Silicon and Apple are still indicating that the only GPU for Apple Silicon is Apple’s GPU, I may not even make the connection that, “Huh this goes against what Bloomberg said that one time.”

 

[Unregistered 4U]

The focus is on whatever product needs the focus at the time. iPhone will always remain the company's primary focus because it's the product leader. The rest of Apple's attention tends to shift from iPad, Mac, Apple Watch etc.

However, I'd argue Apple is doing everything in its power to keep the Mac line relevant. They didn't have to produce a desktop or portable chip. They did so because Macs remains part of their core mission.

Steve Jobs had a great quote back in the 2000's. Paraphrasing he said Apple only had the ability to focus their marketing dollars on a few products per year. So, even though they still had other great products, the public's attention span was short and selecting the right products to showcase was important.

Good point. Almost everything Apple makes is, “We’ve got this good experience from the iPhone, instead of making something new, let’s just build off of that”. The more they focus on the top seller, the more they can use that R&D to create iterative solutions they can flow to the rest of their product spectrum. Which means we’ll always see a new iteration come to some mobile platform first, then an iteration of that, which adds multiples of the same cores, on the desktop. Something TRULY unique and ONLY for desktop is highly unlikely.

Steve ALSO had a quote before he returned to Apple.
"If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth -- and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago."

 

[reviewspin]

I believe a lower cost of entry for base model could make this a win. (Like, a LOT lower though)

re: "Just get a Mac Studio". Meh. The more 3rd party peripherals, cables, hubs, and expansion chassis you need to rely on, the greater opportunity for issues to arise. I prefer to keep everything in a box. No fuss, no muss. (And no spaghetti cable hell!)

The Mac Studio is more of a prosumer solution, IMO.

The Mac Studio has a wide variety of ports available to it. Just look at the Tech Specs. What can the 3rd party hubs provide that you don't already have? I guess I can understand if you need more then 2 USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports, four thunderbolt ports, 2 USB Type A ports and HDMI port. But that is a lot of ports.

But even if you do decide you need a hub - the Mac Studio never moves. Is it so bad to have the Mac Studio on top of some hub instead of being on your desk directly where you can have access to more ports that you apparently need?

 

[MarkC426]

Side question if you are in the know. Do movie makers and tv series creators use the regular software available for everyone else like FCP, AVID, Resolve...etc? I always thought they had more specialized software.

They still use Apple Shake.....😁

 

[JazzyGB1]

Yes, but I don’t have anything that will run my 5.25 Apple II discs. I skipped the IIGS because I assumed that a company would be able to come up with another better replacement later. Still waiting! Plus, waiting for that updated LaserWriter. Also waiting for an updated Airport Express router now that I think about it. And, a regular old iPod, I don’t need it to have wifi/cellular/touchscreen, just a headphone jack.

It seems that Apple can’t “make a profit, keep all their staff and still produce products that are in line with the model they replaced” because there’s a LOT of things that Apple just haven’t replaced.

Now that's not at all true, they've all been replaced, but you know that already or are rather obtuse.
I'm not arguing against advancement, so your straw man argument is irrelevant.

 

[reviewspin]

If you're going to charge $6 grand for this thing, the least you can do is let users upgrade their ram.

I understand the ram is tied to the M2, but I'm sure apple's engineering team could design a chip that works alongside user upgradable ram. Intel can somehow do it.

To be fair, I don't believe Intel has chips (currently) that also have RAM built inside of it.

 

[blackcrayon]

Yes, this is one of the use cases where having lots of RAM helps - when you have massive orchestral libraries that have dozens of articulations. For instance, running very large Vienna Symphonic Library sets can easily run up to 64GB+, and the common practice is to run VSL on a host app on separate computer, and pipe the audio back to your DAW over Ethernet. The current Mac Pro makes it very easy to do that on one machine, so it'd be nice if the future Pro M-chip had at least enough RAM in the SoC to cover that use case.

The smallest maximum you could expect on the new Mac Pro is 128 GB (since the Mac studio w/ M1 Extreme supports that), and you'd expect it to be at least 192-256 GB as a step above that. So it seems like that use case would be covered.

 

[jakey rolling]

So from what I'm hearing people here want in a Mac Pro, Apple would have to design a new chip with user-customisable RAM amounts?

Considering a Mac Pro in a usable configuration already costs the end user over $10k, that's not an unreasonable ask.

 

[MisterAndrew]

I'd rather have a Threadripper based Mac Pro - that is doable.

It looks like Zen 4 Threadripper Pro chips suitable for the Mac Pro will arrive in Q3.

 

[mdriftmeyer]

The focus is on whatever product needs the focus at the time. iPhone will always remain the company's primary focus because it's the product leader. The rest of Apple's attention tends to shift from iPad, Mac, Apple Watch etc.

However, I'd argue Apple is doing everything in its power to keep the Mac line relevant. They didn't have to produce a desktop or portable chip. They did so because Macs remains part of their core mission.

Steve Jobs had a great quote back in the 2000's. Paraphrasing he said Apple only had the ability to focus their marketing dollars on a few products per year. So, even though they still had other great products, the public's attention span was short and selecting the right products to showcase was important.



2023 is giving me 2006—2008 vibes where most of the company's attention was on the iPhone. However, Apple did manage to ship some sleek, new designs including the first MacBook Air during that era. So, we may be in for more in 2023 than it appears.



This was not going to happen. If you look back at Apple operating system history, Apple had already developed Mac OS to run on top of UNIX. It was a shipping product (primarily aimed at research and servers).

A/UX - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

And then there's Copland, which was ambitious but became a complete development disaster.

Copland (operating system) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Apple's problem back then wasn't the lack of desire to create a modern OS. It would have gotten there.

Apple's problem was it didn't have a leader.

Copland and Taligent were two wretched projects and that's not because I'm a NeXT alum first, Apple alum second.

 

[JayKay514]

What they are describing (and they may be describing it badly) is we can only upgrade the hard drive or add additional hard drives. That will not satisfy the Mac Pro market. Especially if they can't add additional sound cards. A lot of sound engineers use their Mac Pro with some additional hardware so they can make music. They need those cards.

Yes and no.

The biggest reason audio engineers need PCIe slots now is for DSP cards, like the Pro Tools HDX or Universal Audio's UAD-2 cards. These are what power their plugins. A few high-end interfaces will have PCIe cards, but increasingly, things have moved to USB-C / Thunderbolt, and audio-over-Ethernet solutions like Dante.

That said, the DSP chips on those cards haven't been upgraded in a long time, and you can only add so many more before you get diminishing returns.

Adding DSP was the only way to do it in the late 90s and early 2000s, when CPUs were still in the hundreds of megahertz / low gigahertz speed range, but CPUs have gotten a lot faster, to the point where there's almost no difference between running a native plugin vs a DSP plugin today; the only question is total system latency.

As noted, even the current Mac Mini can run 900+ instances of a convolution reverb without crashing, so the need for external DSP is a lot less.

For those that do rely on them, UAD have moved towards putting their DSP chips into their Apollo external Thunderbolt interfaces, and their Satellite external DSP boxes; Avid support using external TB chassis for their cards.

In UAD's case, this has enabled them to create their Luna recording system, which uses the onboard DSP in the interfaces to enable zero latency monitoring, which is a huge plus in replicating the responsiveness of an all-analog workflow. (MOTU does something similar, if more modest, in most of their audio interfaces, with DSP-based monitor mixing and a small amount of effects, but not stuff that is printed to tape).

I used to think I needed a PC with lots of slots for DSP cards, but... not anymore.

 

[mdriftmeyer]

They still use Apple Shake.....😁

Of course they use Avid tools, FCP, Logic Pro, etc. They also use Black Magic Design and Avid's custom hardware to boot.

 

[R2DHue]

This was not going to happen. If you look back at Apple operating system history, Apple had already developed Mac OS to run on top of UNIX. It was a shipping product (primarily aimed at research and servers).

“This was not going to happen”?

Apple abandoned A/UX after 1995.

Apple then tried using IBM’s AIX operating system.

Apple gave up on Copland.

Apple’s last, remaining viable OS was System 7.x.

They were in dire straits!

No, I don’t think it was inevitable.

But I do agree that leadership at Apple was the overarching problem.

Probably Apple’s worst ever CEO was John Sculley.

 

[ChrisA]

"...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?

So you will be running Final Cut Pro on your Windows PC?

There is ONLY one reason to buy the Mac Pro and that is to run apps that only run on Macs.

DaVinci Resolve runs on Linux (and Mac and Windows) So if that is the app you use there is little reason to own a Mac.

 

[gagaliya]

Traditionally, the Mac Pro is made as a pro level device that is user upgradeable. Sometimes you are able to update the processor, but always the RAM, GPU, SSD/HD, network cards and sounds cards. They are devices that are expensive - like other workstations - but they can last the user a very long time!

What they are describing (and they may be describing it badly) is we can only upgrade the hard drive or add additional hard drives. That will not satisfy the Mac Pro market. Especially if they can't add additional sound cards. A lot of sound engineers use their Mac Pro with some additional hardware so they can make music. They need those cards.

But I think the report is badly worded because it does mention some "SSD slots where you can put hard drives, GPU's and other devices." So clearly they are talking about PCIe slots.

But the RAM does need to be ECC. Another feature usually meant for Pro Machines.

we all just guessing here, probably much ado about nothing.

1) agree on ecc, it will be a major oversight if they don’t include this in the apple chips for Mac Pro

2) On upgrading the ram / gpu / cpu, even before it wasn’t that useful anyway, people just like the IDEA they can upgrade those 3 components, but very few actually do it. It’s never that practical paying way over priced same pc hardware that are apple certified to upgrade old Mac Pro, if you upgrade all of those might as well get a new one. And the point here is the new chip is powerful enough you don’t really need to upgrade those 3 components for the life of the machine, and for memory just pay the $ for amount you think you need when you order.

3) what is practical and done often is ppl swapping out secondary ssd for different work projects, sounds and other add ons as mentioned, which I assume can still be done.

So in summary, bulk of the mac pro user who just needed processing power should be satisfied by studio ultra, followed by the next large group who needed swappable ssds or specialized add ons should be satisfied by the new mac pro. The only group this will not satisfy are people who actually upgrades their cpu / video card, which I think is a very small group even though everyone is screaming murder. Those guys we call pc users

 

[Unregistered 4U]

Now that's not at all true, they've all been replaced, but you know that already or are rather obtuse.
I'm not arguing against advancement, so your straw man argument is irrelevant.

The LaserWriter has been replaced? The AirPort Base Station?

I wasn’t the one that stated “replacement” as a requirement. I’m content with the fact that, in the reality we live in, Apple sometimes releases new products that can, in some part, replace the product that came before, sometimes they don’t. The situation today is no different than it has been since Apple incorporated as a company.

 

[compwiz1202]

Actually, you will have to buy new M2 Wheels, and they will not have a locking feature still.

lol

Gotta get iWedges for $250 a pop

 

[Mrkevinfinnerty]

“This was not going to happen”?

Apple abandoned A/UX after 1995.

Apple then tried using IBM’s AIX operating system.

Apple gave up on Copland.

Apple’s last, remaining viable OS was System 7.x.

They were in dire straits!

No, I don’t think it was inevitable.

But I do agree that leadership at Apple was the overarching problem.

Probably Apple’s worst ever CEO was John Sculley.

They would never have been able to improve on the original

 

[daveedjackson]

What’s the point in doing a modular Mac to lock the ram. This isn’t what any customer wants. I miss having upgradable ram on the laptop never mind desktop.

 

[jakey rolling]

(Apple is responsible for making 802.11[…] an industry standard too.)

Yeah, not so much, but I'll agree on the USB one.

1.) The conversion to Mac OS X was a heavier lift. Apple was transitioning to a completely different OS architecture with Unix as its base. The software technological differences were so radically different from OS 9 that the transition was tough and painful — but worth it. A necessary evil. I shudder to think what would’ve happened had Apple gone with simply grafting “Modern OS features” onto OS 9. I’m not sure we’d even be talking about a company named Apple at this moment.

Windows NT was a completely different architecture from Win 9x. The reason why the "lift" was "heavier" for Apple was because they were already five years late to start the transition - Microsoft had already been adapting Windows NT technologies (such as Win32) onto Windows 95 in order for developers to develop software that would work in NT.

And Apple did graft modern OS features onto Mac OS 9. Lest we forget Apple attempting to make OS 9 look like a multi-user operating system.

Microsoft’s OS transitions were nothing compared to Apple’s transition to OS X and were more comparable to Apple’s transition to System 7. Microsoft was not replacing DOS with Unix. (And, btw, to this day, DOS is still apparent in Windows and “winks” at you from time to time. The “C: drive” is still in your face.)

You clearly do not know anything about the architecture of Windows if you think that the C:\ drive is DOS "winking" at you. There is not and has never been MS-DOS underpinning Windows NT. There is a virtual DOS mode (NTVDM) that exists for backwards compatibility, and many other design decisions meant to facilitate backwards compatibility (drive letters being one of those decisions). Contrary to what you are implying, the preservation of drive letters and path naming conventions is likely one of the things that helped make the move to a modern OS smoother for Windows users than for Mac users.

Both Apple and Microsoft were transitioning their operating systems from one OS architecture to a completely new, more modern architecture. The fact that Apple chose an existing Unix-based OS while Microsoft built a new OS from scratch should have put Apple ahead of the game. It didn't.

2.) I think you’re missing the point — and softballing the process PC owners endured. (Including extra cost$.)
Broadband providers didn’t need to so much as give Ethernet cards and driver install CDs to Mac owners. No modifications to Ethernet-integrated Macs were required.

You are missing the point as well. You're making out like the process was harder than it really was for PC owners. For the vast majority of PC owners in the late 90's (before ethernet was standard on all PCs as well), it was not a very difficult task, and it was usually one undertaken by a tech, either when that PC owner first bought the computer, or when the ISP's technician came to install their broadband service. Yes, PC users had to install a PCI card into their computer and configure a driver to get on the net. Somehow, most managed to do that without any major trouble.

You are also assuming that most Mac users had built-in Ethernet suitable for broadband. That might have been true when the G3 Desktop and Tower came out, but only a couple of years earlier, those of us who had Macs not only didn't have ethernet cards, we had to buy the more expensive Mac compatible cards by Asante, because the cards provided by the cable company only worked with PCs. That was my experience in 1996 when I first connected to Cable internet with my Performa 6400. Don't even get me started with configuring Open Transport and actually getting the thing working prior to the Mac OS 8.5 days.

I remember at the time, friends with PCs calling me, frazzled about what to do. And I remember helping them buy an Ethernet card. Then they insisted I come over and open up their machines to install it and then the drivers. (Carefully wearing a grounded static protection wrist band for the card install.) It was a PITA.

Good for you for being a knowledgeable tech dude helping out your friends. I'm sure the 20 minutes you spent installing the card were the longest 20 minutes of your life. Then you got to watch while your friends got to download free music off of Napster for nearly a full year before it became available on your computer.

You’re really bending over backwards to force the idea that there was zero difference between connecting to Broadband Internet on a PC vs. a Mac. Not every computer owner is a geek.

As I said before - I was in the business. I was a Mac salesman at a Mac/PC store which also partnered with a broadband ISP offering ADSL to customers. I encountered people everyday in both camps who were getting connected to the internet on both Macs and PCs. I was a Mac fanatic at the time, but even I could see that setting up even a Windows 98 PC to connect to broadband at the time was not that hard, and people everywhere were doing it.

So the point remains, at the time of Broadband’s rollout, most reasonably recent Macs came with Ethernet ports already integrated and no messy driver installations required. And that was A Good Thing™.

I guess your version of history differs from mine. Cest la vie.

 

[Realityck]

What’s the point in doing a modular Mac to lock the ram. This isn’t what any customer wants. I miss having upgradable ram on the laptop never mind desktop.

You're looking at this from the classic PC/workstation perspective. Obviously using a SoC that shares its variety of types of processing with a common memory is quite foreign to most of this legacy industry. The question that the industry now faces is that Intel/AMD might be inclined to do more of the same. If anything that needs to be answered is how can Apple implement high speed data communications to a eGPU or additional SSD? Also with the memory bandwidth speed attained in these SoC's will that require as much memory to do most things that used a lot more memory currently on a PC workstation? (The 128 GB RAM vs 1 TB RAM question)

 

[docbop]

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

So it will be a Mac Studio that's been given HGH to grow tall. Apple time to throw in the towel on the Mac Pro with Apple silicon, Apple SoC isn't designed for expandable systems.