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I’m a fringe minority- I drag my 2019 MP around the world for work. The current gen is a total bitch to haul around while the 2013 trashcan + Thunderbay could fit in a duffle bag and carried on your shoulder (don’t skip shoulder day kids). Would also fit in overhead bins.

So I’m exited about the possible reduction in weight and size. Knocking some $$$ off the price is nice too.

M1 performance wise- using Logic for huge projects barely makes the current Xeons raise an eyelid, so I’m not wanting for horsepower. But perhaps the M1 will feel snappier? Not sure.
 
No possibility with an M1. M1 has no external memory expansion and no additional PCIe lanes to support slots.
Maybe an M1 variant with all the added peripherals, but no an M1 as it is today.
That’s what I was getting at. If they’re doing a “cube” or mini Mac Pro there’s no way in hell today’s M1 would be used. It would either be a beefed up M1 (think M1X) or whatever their performance line of chips will be called (P1?) if the higher end chips are indeed going to be spectate entities.
 
I’m a fringe minority- I drag my 2019 MP around the world for work. The current gen is a total bitch to haul around while the 2013 trashcan + Thunderbay could fit in a duffle bag and carried on your shoulder (don’t skip shoulder day kids). Would also fit in overhead bins.

So I’m exited about the possible reduction in weight and size. Knocking some $$$ off the price is nice too.
Honestly, I would LOVE a new trashcan machine based on Apple silicon. I deployed so many of those when I worked at ESPN, truly a beautiful design up close.
 
Beautiful as design element, but not practical for PRO use. it stands as pro, but in actul life it is not.
🤷‍♂️ Seemed to work fine for the video professionals at ESPN at the time. Any giant place like that has servers do the heavy lifting, but as local workstations for doing all the pre-processing it did its job and I never heard any complaints (I was the guy that dealt in person with computer problems so I would have known about them).

Obviously if you’re the freelancing/individual type of Pro the machine rapidly became obsolete. But deployed at large corporations it did its job well for years.

What I meant by updating the trash can with the Apple silicon is that Apple’s architecture *clearly* generates less heat while consuming less power. That means reusing the chassis (and not the old motherboard/dualGPU internal layout) would be a really fun thing because that design moves A LOT of air. It’s never going to happen, because of the cultural view of the trash can Mac as being a flop (and being known as a trash can obviously) is a real thing, but man I bet it would be one hell of a machine.
 
Not many people are going to pay $6000 bucks for an iPad / iPhone processor Mac Pro
With no GPU or CPU upgrade path.

The sales numbers will be worse than the current Mac Pro.
 
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Apple would need 10x the GPU performance of M1 in order to beat a top end Radeon or GTX card.

Whether it's an M1X, M2, or whatever else, it's not going to beat the GPU performance of an Intel-based Mac Pro in the near future.
I understand that, but if this rumor is true (to me it sounds like an undated rehash of an older one) and there is a compact Cube-like machine in development *along side* an updated current much larger chassis Mac Pro...no one would expect the much larger one to be outclassed in every way by the compact one right?

I think what we’re peeking into here is that people who have been asking forever a Mac Pro mini are finally getting one with the caveat that an intel version of it will NEVER exist. But it certainly isn’t going to have an M1 in it, the Mac mini already has that.

Does my line of thought make sense here?
 
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The second machine will use Apple silicon chips and it will be less than half the size of the current Mac Pro, putting it somewhere between the existing Mac Pro and the Mac mini. It will feature a mostly aluminum exterior, and Bloomberg suggests that it could "invoke nostalgia" for the Power Mac G4 Cube.

I realize it‘s Bloomberg’s error, not Macrumors, but MR did choose to quote just this phrase...

Anyway, the word they are looking for is evoke.
 
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Most likely because Apple doesn’t have a M series chip capable of meeting or exceeding the very high end intel Xeon processor used in high end Mac Pro configurations. I’d be surprised if Apple ever did. The Mac Pro is such a low volume product that they might slap an M1X or whatever into it someday, keep the expandability and call it a day.

What *IS* it with people repeatedly saying "ever" and "never" in tech?
 
Beautiful as design element, but not practical for PRO use. it stands as pro, but in actul life it is not.
You'd be surprised which professional environments are running the trashcans, even now. They're everywhere in the entertainment industry running Media Composer, ProTools, VFX software, jammed in racks with expansion slot enclosures and wired to some pretty hardcore NAS setups.

Apple def missed the bullseye in designing a professional computer there, but we kinda worked around that. Wasn't ideal though.
 
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Is there some reality you see where this device gets released with an M1 in it? Why?

I guess if we see a future Mac Pro variant as essentially a souped-up Mac mini.

One downside is ram. Apple still charges obscene amounts for ram upgrades, which people put up with because they can still buy a desktop Mac with base ram and then manually add third-party ram afterwards. If Apple is willing to offer ram upgrades at more affordable rates to make up for the fact that you can’t add extra ram after the purchase, that would help alleviate a lot of the pain points right there.
 
At last...the mythical mid-range Mac desktop. I don't believe it until I see it.
But since Ive left things have definitely been improving on the Mac hardware. Even the #$@% touchbar is going away!

It may be too late for me. Will this Mac run Linux?
 
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Make yourself a Ryzentosh in an 011D Mini case, put a 5950X and a RX5700 XT GPU, use that fast non proprietary PCIe4 m.2 drives, put some SSDs and 2 HDDs in a hot swappable cage and laugh at the Mac Pro buyers who got a slower machine with less storage and paid more for it.
 
If I could get a Mac Mini Pro that just lets me swap out at least two M.2 drives, a single full size GPU, and RAM that would be great. But how will this work if it's an Apple variant? Will Apple sell upgrade parts or will they allow some limited compatibility with certain PC parts or brand partners that get certification?
 
It looks like Apple is slowly approaching making my computing dream come true:

12” MacBook + 5K display + Mac Pro mini

My other dream has just been fulfilled by the iPhone 12 mini. Good times! (I won’t say no to a iPhone 13 Pro mini next year though, I miss the 2x camera.)
 
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And that they were both a bad deal. The Cube was more expensive then the PowerMac G4 and could do less. It was a design piece. Similar with the trashcan: Yes the "thermal corner" was a problem, but also expandability. That has not changed.
The thermal corner is a lot larger now that ASi has been introduced. The trashcan can cool in the order of 500W, same as the iMac Pro. You will get very good performance with 500W ASi. The Cube was too early and the Trashcan hampered by Intel and AMD non progress.

Now is the time. Look at the MB Air. Without a fan and very competitive. See this product as Mac Pro Air. Completely silent, yet powerful enough to do many of not most professional work. Looks like a music production dream machine.
 
I would expect basic expansion of Ram and ssd together with GPU upgradeable would be spot on (most likely an Apple designed GPU I imagine).
Can’t see them doing it with PCIE slots, based on the M1 chip designs and lack of egpu support.
Yes, what kind of upgradability can we expect here? I would not be surprised if we find limited upgradability options such as SSD, memory, Apple GPU, Afterburner and similar Apple produced cards (no third party). Will it be completely modular and also include slots for upgrading the CPUs (Mx)? Will they instead use multi Mx architecture for scaling like the supercomputer do?

Apple has now so many nice opportunities for end customisation of the performance.

I guess some still use PCI slots for non GPU cards, but that cannot be many.
 
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