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MP All Models Apple sleeping on the mac pro is comically bad timing
- Thread starter daftna
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He's never going to answer that. He is using the old IT guy "make it sound complicated so I look smart and they shut up" method.
Bug-Creator
macrumors 68000
Sure, just the small problem that no MPro ever was a halo product.
The 2013,19 and M2-Ultra ones were the exact opposite of a halo product.
They were seen as pointless waste of money by anybody who didn't have a specific use case for them. Regardless of Mac owner or not.
Flint Ironstag
macrumors 68000
Nobody running towers of this caliber cares about bang per watt. We can afford the electricity. And our power crushes AS. Come to grips with that.
Any purpose I see fit. See my thread on MP 2019 sanity check.
mattspace
macrumors 68040
For perspective; I think Apple is fragile insofar as I thnk their inclination is to double down on a trend, just as it becomes over-cooked, and culture goes in the opposite direction. The Macbook Neo, it's cheap, and there's a worldwide recession. I would be unsurprised if Apple took the success of that product to "improve it' by making it more expensive, putting a notch into it, shuffling it higher into the pricerange, when cheap was literally its only selling point.
To look at the car world by way of metaphor; Ferrari have been going more and more digital with cars, more and more electronic, more and more performance, unheralded performance...
...and what are the customers for supercars and hypercars demanding from makers?
Customers want slower cars, with manual transmission, no hybridisation. Electric supercars are being cancelled, hyper-analogue restomods are the hottest thing in the automotive world. Customers want a visceral experience; a steamtrain they can use on the road.
And Ive now designs a car for Ferrari that's been panned by everyone who already owns a Ferrari, will probably sell some to vulgar new money people, but it'll never become a collector's item, so the financing packages which underpin a lot of supercar sales will collapse for it.
Like Ferrari, Apple is fragile to its own success (and hey, there's Eddie Cue at both companies).
AI is the feature Apple's performance is so good for? But AI is the feature most people HATE in their products, so who is all this performance serving? #NoAI authenticity is the emerging paradigm. In day to day usage, the modern Mac is less capable than it used to be, because modern software has gone so far down the "simple is easier" fallacy, that it's past the inflection point of "less is less".
I suspect KDE, for example, can get good at being user-friendly and covering more people's use cases on existing "obsolete" hardware faster than Apple can become anti-fragile to circumstances. If the EU for example, which is a larger population than the USA, uses competition law to fundamentally break the trying points of Apple's ecosystem (given the political animosity, and Europe's sovereignty push for technology), I think that's existential for Apple.
...which is one good reason why Apple is wise to focus on mobile, laptop, all-in-one and small-form-factor systems - which is what the vast majority of people are buying anyway - where Apple Silicon has a clear advantage.
Patroclus
macrumors member
The difference using a MacPro would be that you don't need to link multiple MacStudio.
You loose performance.
The proposal that started this thread was that Apple should have made new Mac Pro with lots of plug-in GPUs for running local AI. The counter-argument was that the Mini and Studio are already selling to people who want to do local AI (to the point that they sold out) without Apple really needing to "double down" on anything (apart from maybe getting the M5 Mini and Studio out the door a bit smartly). The Mini and Studio have much broader markets than just AI and will still be in demand if the bubble burts. Even the Studio Ultra is a "simple" doubling-up of Max dies and is a much lesser gamble than the all-new die that would be needed for a credible PCIe tower.
Even with AI in general - everybody has been screaming at them to up their in-house AI game for a couple of years, but they've instead licensed third party models for their Siri update. Given that, as we speak, markets are falling partly because people are questioning the value of AI stocks, Apples reticence to go big on home-grown AI could turn out to have been a company-saving throw. Meanwhile, they've have to mention AI every five minutes to stop the shareholders panicing.
They'd be mad not to follow through on the success of the Neo and dumb to make it significantly more expensive (although computer prices are being pushed up across the board) - but there's no sign yet that they will be so stupid. Actually, a cheap Neo gives them some scope to push the Air a bit more upmarket.
Note that the Neo was not random accident - it's a clear reaction to the success of the "new old" M1 Airs that Apple were selling via Walmart up to the Neo launch.
Another person living in the past. In Apple Silicon era then the Mac Pro is just a Studio with PCIe slot fed by a PCIe switch as the Ultra SoC doesn’t have enough lanes to connect them directly. It is not a large Xeon or Threadripper with lots of PCe slots.
If there was a Mac Pro launched with the M3 Ultra Studio then would have the same M3 Ultra SoC as the Studio so would still be linking Mac Pro together with TB and the same performances.
The Mac Pro Tower is dead.
So please explain how a Mac Pro with M3 Ultra outperforms Mac Studio with M3 Ultra when have same SoC.
For which Apple literally could not give a s**t as they don’t make towers.
They leave that for other vendors as they don’t fit into Apples ecosystem.
I see someone brought up Ferrari, well I bet Ferrari don’t get upset when people say they need a 7 seat MPV either as Ferrari don’t make 7 seat MPV.
If there is a group of people that needs to comes to grips with something then is all the people that failed to notice.
Apple not shipped a model with Nvidia GPU since MBP 2014.
Apple stopped the Nvidia Web Driver with Mojave in 2018.
Apple stopped supporting discrete GPU in current models when ended the iMac 2020 and Mac Pro 2019 and all AS models.
Yet for some reason still bleating that Apple doesn’t build a Tower with big CPU with lots of PCI lanes to support GPU that they don’t support either.
To what end? To what purpose? Aren't you embarrassed that everyone can see your continued refusal to answer the question?
If you actually use it for an important purpose, you could explain it here. But I looked at that thread and the only mention of hash cracking was when you said you use it for hash cracking.
I just don’t get why he won’t just say “I like screwing around with computers”
Like he’s embarrassed or something
I read the first couple pages and it seems he just likes the idea of all this stuff he bought.
"- robust / solid build quality & reliability
- spare parts availability
- internal and external PCIe expansion
- upgradeable subsystems
- sufficient internal volume to cram a load of hardware
- capable enough to easily ingest and process large (workstation sized not cluster) projects and datasets from any discipline without impacting general UI responsiveness
- unobtrusive presence
- operate silently
- run Big Sur natively (not ready to proxmox or FreeBSD this one just yet)
- be interesting and of use to the community, especially as prices keep dropping"
These are things that makes him feel warm and fuzzy, but anything in here that's useful in the real world is also true of modern Macs, and anything that isn't is pointless in the real world.
If you want to spend thousands of dollars on 1TB of RAM that could have got you an entire AS Mac that would be better for real world usage, you do whatever floats your boat. But when you claim that you're doing pro stuff with it that Apple silicon can't do, you open yourself up to scrutiny. And when you accuse others of being just too ignorant to understand the complicated pro stuff you're doing, you really open yourself up to scrutiny.
And the refusal to answer basic questions just shows the underlying intention to retain the projected identity and clout.
257Loner
macrumors 6502a
Not to be a spoilsport, but Siri AI was revealed today and the future is software.
The presenters constantly referred to on-device AI and cloud AI with secure servers. What devices do people all over the world have? iPhones. Not Mac Pros.
The presenters constantly referred to on-device AI and cloud AI with secure servers. What devices do people all over the world have? iPhones. Not Mac Pros.
I wonder what makes you think that? M-series performance has been growing linearly since M1 (with occasional significant jumps), and M5 delivered a quite substantial increase in IPC on complex logic. The GPU improvements have been even more remarkable. On some demanding GPU workloads, we've seen the M5 family performing 30-40% faster compared to M4. In Blender, the M5 Max is on par with the M3 Ultra — that's 2x improvement in 2.5 years. Nobody in the industry shows such growth, at least not in the last decade.
Yes, I suppose that Intel now makes laptop CPUs that are competitive agains Apple's two year old smartphone chips... at 2x higher price and who knows how much higher power consumption. If you think that's something to be proud of, sure. What I find more interesting is that Apple laptops are faster at building and testing code than Intel's towers, which is what I care about.
IMO, Apple hasn't been truly interested in Pro level computing since the Mac Pro 4,1/5,1. That was the real end. They were in the game with the G3, G4, G5 Powermacs and then up to the MP5,1. That was really the inflection point where iPhones, iPads and to a lesser extent Mac laptops became their focus. The 6,1 was Apple just taking everything on the inside of a midtower and putting it on the outside, proprietary GPUs, to push...Thunderbolt? The 7,1...they were forced into it, kicking and screaming. The engineers, God Bless them, hit it out of the park on that system (I don't think there has been a better designed and put together system since or likely even before) and it was the last day in the sun for the Mac Pros.
High end pro systems? They have abandoned that space to Dell Precisions, HP Zs, Lenovo ThinkCentres all of which can be expanded to incredible levels. Heck, you can buy an old dual CPU Cascade Lake workstation today, throw in tons of DDR4, a few cheap Xeon Golds/Platinums and a few high end GPUs and do a good number of things even maxxed M5 Macs would struggle with. Go modern Xeon/Threadripper and well, it isn't pretty at all for Apple Silicon. (lack of high end GPU support and huge RAM count is what kills them in this comparison).
I love my Pro Macs. I still have my old MDD 1.4ghz, G5 Quad, Mac Pro 4,1->5,1 and Mac Pro 7,1 still. For creatives, devs and every day users, the new Silicon Macs are amazing, but they suck for expand-ability and wires all over the place for accessories is a mess, just a square version of the trashcan Mac Pro without the thermal issues and expandable RAM/storage. For top end compute, power draw and expense be damned, it is an Intel/AMD/Nvidia world. Not a knock against Apple at all, they just quit the Pro market which wasn't where their bread was buttered anymore and hadn't been in 20 years.
Sorry for the long post, Pro Macs trigger me I guess lol. Now if you really want to see me rant, ask me about Apple Music...
With that novel written, my next Mac will likely be a M5 Mac Mini or maybe a base M5 Studio 🙂
High end pro systems? They have abandoned that space to Dell Precisions, HP Zs, Lenovo ThinkCentres all of which can be expanded to incredible levels. Heck, you can buy an old dual CPU Cascade Lake workstation today, throw in tons of DDR4, a few cheap Xeon Golds/Platinums and a few high end GPUs and do a good number of things even maxxed M5 Macs would struggle with. Go modern Xeon/Threadripper and well, it isn't pretty at all for Apple Silicon. (lack of high end GPU support and huge RAM count is what kills them in this comparison).
I love my Pro Macs. I still have my old MDD 1.4ghz, G5 Quad, Mac Pro 4,1->5,1 and Mac Pro 7,1 still. For creatives, devs and every day users, the new Silicon Macs are amazing, but they suck for expand-ability and wires all over the place for accessories is a mess, just a square version of the trashcan Mac Pro without the thermal issues and expandable RAM/storage. For top end compute, power draw and expense be damned, it is an Intel/AMD/Nvidia world. Not a knock against Apple at all, they just quit the Pro market which wasn't where their bread was buttered anymore and hadn't been in 20 years.
Sorry for the long post, Pro Macs trigger me I guess lol. Now if you really want to see me rant, ask me about Apple Music...
With that novel written, my next Mac will likely be a M5 Mac Mini or maybe a base M5 Studio 🙂
If you mean an Apple silicon Mac pro it’s identical to a Mac Studio
If you mean an Intel Mac Pro, you lose performance because you dont have shared integrated memory and have much less vram
mattspace
macrumors 68040
Which is not going to be available in the European Union.
To quote the erudite chap above;
So the "future" for Apple, is technology (repackaged Google), which they're not even allowed to offer in the market who in the modern context, tends to set the agenda (when it's not Australia with our stupid under-16s social media bans) for technology world-wide.
Flint Ironstag
macrumors 68000
Man I feel you. My next Macs will definitely be more MP 2019s. Mostly rack mount.
keksikuningas
macrumors 6502
Did your workload requirements never change? I had multiple situations where an upgrade was needed due to "running out of computer". My friend had similar issues. because of using a Thinkpad, you just requested a RAM upgrade with the IT department. Applying for a whole ass $3000 macbook is much more difficult in comparison (although with ram prices nowadays...). I guess depends on the size of a company / department though.
splifingate
Contributor
My experience doesn't speak to every organisation, but best practise that I've seen followed for at least the last 8 or so years is whether Mac or Windows, user devices 16GB RAM and 512GB storage have been the minimum. And if someone is in a position where they're known to need more than a standard device they would be able to get a higher performance option to begin with.
99.5% of your users will be in either the standard or high performance tier, and the device they choose will last them 3 years.
The remaining .5% who have business or academic reasons to get specialised equipment would be ordering whatever they want via grant money or other special funds.
And when the 3 year warranty runs out you just do it all over again, eWaste the old device and make some money back that you put towards ordering the next devices.
All this to say, this idea where you have a bunch of desktops that you keep upgrading over and over and spending human labour to go and upgrade is not the future, or the current for that matter.
splifingate
Contributor
Which should run nicely on my M4 MBA.
However, much to my chagrin, it will not be available on my M4 IPP (a device which basically fits your thesis).
It's not about "never" - its about how often, and how much of a selling point upgradability is, vs. the power efficiency/speed advantages of closely integrated RAM, SSD etc... and, yes, about companies making money from selling more complete new systems (which - until the post-scarcity utopia arrives - inspires them to make nice stuff).
Remember, what people are asking Apple to do is create a new SoC die just for Mac Pros which throws away the advantages of unified, close-coupled LPDDR RAM and on-chip GPU/NPU. That has to be weighed against the disadvantages of non-upgradeability.
Yes, I've updated RAM and Storage "mid life" - but only on maybe 1 in 5 systems I've used at work or personally. Otherwise, by the time I "run out of compute" there's a whole laundry list of CPU, GPU upgrades, new RAM protocols, new versions of SATA/PCIe/NVMe etc. that make getting a new system a better bet (esp. if the old one can be re-purposed rather than gutted). Even when I had upgraded "mid life" it was usually because of high BTO prices causing me to under-specify the original system.
It's not the good old days of "peak Moore's law" any more, and hasn't been for some time (even before the current shortages). Back then, bytes-per-buck was shooting up exponentially, and six months after settling for 1GB RAM you could get 2GB for the same price. Right now it is kinda the other way around and - sadly - I'm not holding my breath for RAM and storage prices to fall back to anything like 2024 levels even if the current supply issues are resolved. We've had 50 years of zero inflation for ever-more-powerful tech, I think that is over and we'll see inflation as usual going forward.
We're not talking about 8 vs. 16 vs. 32GB RAM here - this is about pro systems for heavy lifting. If you're buying "Mac Pro" systems with 256GB, 512GB, 1TB or more then (unless you have a gold-filled swimming pool you need to empty) you're buying that much to do a job and have presumably done your homework - you don't sleepwalk in to that sort of config. With Apple Silicon you're bumping up against what the memory controller can support - your M5 Max won't support 512GB even if Apple switched to press-fit LPCAMMs. Even with the beloved 2019 Mac Pro you had to choose the right M=suffix processor on day one if you wanted 1TB or more of RAM - at a premium of several thousand bucks.