Sorry, you are not even close to correct. A PCIe X16 slot can transfer bidirectionally at 64GB/s while a Thunderbolt 3/4 connected expansion delivers (at best) PCIe 3.0 X4 Slots, with at best 40Gb/s (less than 1/12 the speed), not counting the increased latency.
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Apple Unveils New Mac Pro With M2 Ultra Chip and More
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I know there is a bandwidth difference. A person will need to decide if that increased bandwidth is worth the extra $3000.
Maxed out Mac Studio delivery is now 30 days out.
Since I already have all the peripherals glad that they don't include them to keep the cost down. The Apple mouse is so ergo metrically poor I would just have to thrown it away.
Highly unlikely due to regulators.
"The parties agreed to terminate the Agreement because of significant regulatory challenges preventing the consummation of the transaction,"
NVIDIA and SoftBank Group Announce Termination of NVIDIA’s Acquisition of Arm Limited
NVIDIA and SoftBank Group Corp. (SBG) today announced the termination of the previously announced transaction whereby NVIDIA would acquire Arm Limited from SBG.
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Curious what machine you have and what its configuration is.
Actually, those are very much edge cases. My b/f has a 2019 Mac Pro, with a Vega Duo, and 96GB of RAM and a 16TB M.2 RAID. He uses After Effects (although has mostly switched to Fusion - better, more powerful, stable and reliable), Premiere and DaVinci Resolve (now his editor of choice). He used to use Photoshop, but now almost exclusively uses ProCreate, Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher, and Pixelmator Pro. RAM has not been a problem for him, but having more/faster video RAM would be great. Most of the video we shoot is 8K Blackmagic RAW and has never been a problem for his system.
Yes, Adobe’s products are pigs, but we have not seen a need for that much RAM.
The top configuration for this machine is under $12,000. We would expense that under IRS Code Section 179, not aromatize it over 5 years. Not one of the studios or visual effects houses where I have consulted would ever add cards or upgrade one of these one they were purchased. We bought our 2019 Mac Pros in January of 2020 and would have replaced it this last January had we had that option. The machine had already paid for itself by the end of its first year of operation.
Your experience is radically different that mine.
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After effects and the adobe suite take whatever you give them. My 192gb ram Mac Pro is also all the time maxed out when I use adobe stuff.
This is such a bizarre argument. Apple does not disclose its sales to anyone, nor do they need to justify their actions to anyone in that way. They built this because it solves a problem for the small number of users who need it.
Almost no one wants nor has wanted PCIe slots for a long time. The small number of users do will buy this machine.
Inflation adjusted that system cost $18,000 in today’s dollars. It also was not infinitely upgradable, but was fine for a small number of years, just as this will be.
A single slot PCIe enclosure is $599. That does not get you any x16 slots. This gets you two. Six of those are $3,600.
...and those Thunderbolt ports will only ever support up to 4-lane bandwidth, meaning many PCIe cards are crippled.
Even my opencore'ed 5,1 can accept 256GB if I want lol. But yeah that's with select of ancient DDR3 ECC with custom memory config on opencore, not native way.
Glad I picked 12c 7,1 with W6800 last year. Beefing up memory to 384GB with no fuss. I have no interest with 8,1 AS.
AS SoC is antithesis from upgradeable traditional workstation box, they good for thin, portable and mini PC, that's why I am not too shocked when Apple announced half ass Mac Pro. Heck, even my Quad G5 are more expandable than current AS MP
🤣
Glad I picked 12c 7,1 with W6800 last year. Beefing up memory to 384GB with no fuss. I have no interest with 8,1 AS.
AS SoC is antithesis from upgradeable traditional workstation box, they good for thin, portable and mini PC, that's why I am not too shocked when Apple announced half ass Mac Pro. Heck, even my Quad G5 are more expandable than current AS MP
🤣
I actually think if the quad chip hadn't been cancelled it would have made an amazing workstation chip, being an SoC has nothing to do with it. NVIDIA is working on building an experience in much the same way Apple is, I expect that NVIDIA will be trying to tie their two chips from the grace hopper super chip together more closely in subsequent iterations. Additionally the new NVIDIA grace hopper super chip does not support upgradeable RAM.
I just did a couple of builds at the store.
I can't believe the top of the line Mac Pro is now only $3000 more than the top of the line Mac Studio with identical M2 ultra chips and 8TB ssd's.
The era of the ridiculously insane mid-high five-figure Mac Pros is OVER.
They're going to sell a TON of these, because the new WAY LOWER pricing far offsets the non-upgradeable elements. Also it opens up the Mac Pro to more often more feasible upgrading. I actually think that was better than making a Mac Pro with the system on upgradeable boards and charging the old premium prices.
Smart move. Obviously they were taking into account the practical market worthlessness of the intel Mac Pros.
As far as the grousing over memory, I've been using 64 Gig on my Mac Pro for years now and 192 will be more than sufficient. Especially since it's integrated.
To say I am overjoyed is a massive understatement. The last thing I expected from Apple was realistic pricing on the flagship. Or it coming, now.
I was also very pleased with the Mac Studio video and Apple's attention in a time-limited packed presentation to the cachet of pros using the Mac Studio. That has always been Apple's marketing ace in the hole when it came to Macs.
I expected to forward past the Apple Vision Pro segment, but they hooked me on that too. I will have to research that much electronics that close to your head, but looks like the future and only time will tell if tumors start showing up. Remember when everyone used cellphones at their ears? But I still want one.
They did a good job explaining too why the price is what some see as too high. A lot of tech went into the thing, and it is a computer, not a peripheral.
I can't believe the top of the line Mac Pro is now only $3000 more than the top of the line Mac Studio with identical M2 ultra chips and 8TB ssd's.
The era of the ridiculously insane mid-high five-figure Mac Pros is OVER.
They're going to sell a TON of these, because the new WAY LOWER pricing far offsets the non-upgradeable elements. Also it opens up the Mac Pro to more often more feasible upgrading. I actually think that was better than making a Mac Pro with the system on upgradeable boards and charging the old premium prices.
Smart move. Obviously they were taking into account the practical market worthlessness of the intel Mac Pros.
As far as the grousing over memory, I've been using 64 Gig on my Mac Pro for years now and 192 will be more than sufficient. Especially since it's integrated.
To say I am overjoyed is a massive understatement. The last thing I expected from Apple was realistic pricing on the flagship. Or it coming, now.
I was also very pleased with the Mac Studio video and Apple's attention in a time-limited packed presentation to the cachet of pros using the Mac Studio. That has always been Apple's marketing ace in the hole when it came to Macs.
I expected to forward past the Apple Vision Pro segment, but they hooked me on that too. I will have to research that much electronics that close to your head, but looks like the future and only time will tell if tumors start showing up. Remember when everyone used cellphones at their ears? But I still want one.
They did a good job explaining too why the price is what some see as too high. A lot of tech went into the thing, and it is a computer, not a peripheral.
I feel we are wasting our time explaining this to people. Thunderbolt is great, but not for PCIe expansion cards. Going to be a real bummer if the 2023 MP turns out to have crippled PCIe expansion that is driven by TB4 bandwidth.
The presentation mentioned PCIe 4.0, so it offers twice the bandwidth of the 2019 Mac Pro, which is on PCIe 3.0.
I've seen a few Apple podcasters and YouTube content creators state their belief that Apple's goal with this Mac Pro was to "poison" it so that the "pro" macOS customer base would move to the Mac Studio and they could then kill the Mac Pro off as a product line.
I find this view understandable from a "I am disappointed in this product" angle because it is Mac Studio with PCIe expansion slots, but I also find it non-sensical from a historical standpoint because the 2013 Mac Pro made it clear that "external only" expansion is too limiting for a small, but important, part of the macOS customer base. Apple had to publicly admit they messed up the fundamental design with the 2013 model, and yet people now say Apple should have just repeated history and stopped with the Mac Studio.
And those people are willing to pay a premium - even an extreme one - for that functionality. Their revenue streams pay for these machines in a matter of months so "value for money" compared to a Mac Studio or Mac mini Pro is not a criteria (or one so lowly-weighted that it does not change their mind off the Mac Pro).
Apple Silicon is a fundamentally different take on compute and graphics philosophy from the "traditional" PC view (especially over the last decade). It is not about offering extreme levels of performance through extreme power and heat budgets requiring extreme cooling. As such, it will perform poorly - even extremely poorly - in some workloads that can leverage all the power you can throw at it (provided you can dissipate all the heat that power needs).
It will be interesting to see if there is a "dead cat bounce" with aftermarket sales prices now that the machine is no longer available for sale with people who want one now that the 2023 model has arrived are willing to accept only a handful more years of active OS support.
I think that the current Mac Pro would be a fantastic machine if one of the following were true.
- It cost only a $1000 premium over the Mac Studio
- It had some sort of compute accelerator story - as I’ve said elsewhere, I favour the compute cluster in a case model where you have M2 Ultras on MPX compute blades that are essentially whole computers you work with as you would as if they were in separate cases
At $1000 premium the option to use expansion cards looks more appealing.
Maybe they will sell well, maybe they wont, time will tell.
The Bill of Materials for the case, fans, power supply, expansion card and systemboard probably approaches $1000.
The cost to design, develop, validate and then ship such a configuration would have made the base price a fair bit higher than the $6999. And for those who only needed PCIe expansion, they would then be forced to pay significantly more for features they did not need.
In an effort to address the desires of the smallest niche of customers (who arguably might not even exist considering Apple has not offered a mult-CPU Mac option since 2012), Apple would have alienated the significant majority of existing Mac Pro customers (many of whom may very well have decided the M2 Ultra Mac Studio is "good enough" for their needs).
The 2023 Mac Pro costs $1000 than the 2019 Mac Pro. Inflation over the past four years alone covers that ($6000 in 2019 is $7100 today), but it also comes with a 64GB of RAM vs. 32GB and a 1TB SSD vs. 256GB and at Apple OEM upgrade prices, that is $1000 right there.
Apple knows from the 2019 model what their market will pay for the feature-set of the Mac Pro and they have most-certainly been working with that market to define that feature-set.
It might sell a bit less than the 2019 model because the "Windows / Gamer" crowd will not be buying it (for the fact it is not on Intel, much less cannot be packed with discrete GPU cards) or it might sell far more because software optimized for the compute and graphics capabilities of the M2 Ultra (like Final Cut and Logic Pro) will not need to spend many thousands more on things like the Afterburner card or the higher-end MPX video cards.
The Bill of Materials for the case, fans, power supply, expansion card and systemboard probably approaches $1000.
I doubt this for the following reasons:
The main board has an extra Ethernet channel and PCIE slots, the expansion cards are far less expensive than you think they are, everyone is blinded by Apple’s pricing but you can easily find (with some googling) the price of PCBs and memory and other such components and they are not nearly as expensive as Apple fans like to pretend they are.
The Mac Studio has an expensive case and cooling solution too.
I expect that the BOM is probably closer to $150 for everything that isn’t the case. The case could be $1000 I suppose because that machining is pretty intense and starting with solid aluminum does crank up the price…
I think that people who would have been open to cross shopping the studio and the Mac Pro, who may have thought it would be nice to have internal expansion, are turned away by the pricing, that is what I am concerned about. I don’t really care about the gamer crowd and while my theoretical use case may be niche at least it would give more differentiation over the studio.
Yes, there probably are some people who would consider a Mac Pro over a Mac Studio if the price delta was $1500 instead of $3000, but Apple would certainly know this and still chose to charge the full OEM BTO price for the RAM and SSD upgrades they included in the base model (vis-a-vis the 2019 Mac Pro).
I suppose the cynic could say that Apple wants to soak every Mac Pro customer because those customers have no choice but to buy a Mac Pro. But unlike 2019, in 2023 Apple does have another Mac model that offers almost everything the Mac Pro does so if they are just charging more "because they are greedy SoBs", then they are just leaving money on the table for if the Mac Pro was only $1000-1500 more than the Mac Studio, a not-insignificant number of people likely would have chosen the Mac Pro just for "future-proofing" if nothing else and that would be millions in extra revenue they could have collected in addition to all the "assured" sales they had from enterprise and "pro" customers.
So I really believe this thing costs $3000 more than a similarly-configured Mac Studio because the production and shipping costs per unit are significantly more than the Mac Studio and Apple is probably setting a higher margin level per unit to account for the lower sales (in general, even if Apple had chosen a smaller price delta).
I'm really impressed, most people in this forum says this computer is overpriced, to be honest all mac products are overpriced, specially RAM and Storage upgrades.
But even knowing that apple is more expensive than any other computer, people here says macs are well priced, except this Mac Pro.
Taking aside pricing, the problem that I see is the RAM and Video Cards, people that need lots of RAM are now limited to 192, most of us are fine with much less memory (64 in my case) but previous intel mac pro users that needed lots of RAM are now pissed.
Storage is not a problem because you can upgrade later either by their expensive mac storage or by SATA/PCIe expansion cards.
The real problem that I see is the video card, limited to Apple Graphics is gonna limit their user base even more that currently is.
So this computer will have an even smaller user base than previous mac pros, high price, no add on GPU, limited to 192 in RAM.
But even knowing that apple is more expensive than any other computer, people here says macs are well priced, except this Mac Pro.
Taking aside pricing, the problem that I see is the RAM and Video Cards, people that need lots of RAM are now limited to 192, most of us are fine with much less memory (64 in my case) but previous intel mac pro users that needed lots of RAM are now pissed.
Storage is not a problem because you can upgrade later either by their expensive mac storage or by SATA/PCIe expansion cards.
The real problem that I see is the video card, limited to Apple Graphics is gonna limit their user base even more that currently is.
So this computer will have an even smaller user base than previous mac pros, high price, no add on GPU, limited to 192 in RAM.
That's because you are not into hifi headphones/earphones, expensive ones (headphones and earphones) cost $5,000.00+
I bet that their are going Apple GPU only for the foreseeable future. As far as I remember, before they went to intel, their video cards were proprietary.