TheYayAreaLiving 🎗️
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I think it has to do with the Size and Mac Pro comes with classy Mac Pro Wheels. In which, Mac Studio doesn't.
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First Benchmark Result Surfaces for Mac Pro With M2 Ultra Chip
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What is your workflow?
I’m assuming you’re self employed? I’ve worked in colleges, and ESPN. Never once upgraded RAM on anything other than low end laptops.
ESPN had a policy of buying what was actually needed to produce content, not hobbyist twiddling with hardware which seems completely nonsensical for a company to do by policy….
They should have planned for expansion architecture when they started their own line of processors, even though they were just for mobile devices then.
You get a Mac Pro over a Studio because the Mac Pro has user upgradeable memor.... Oh, it can't do that.
Well, you get a Mac Pro because it offers support for extra GPUs... Oh, it can't do that anymore either.
Yeah, just get a Mac Studio.
That’s what I think. We heard rumors of M1 AND M2 extremes but we’re cancelled. And Apple spent what, 2 minutes talking about the Mac Pro?
I think they released it now vs wait for M3 because they had to finish the transition.
The Pro has an amazing cooling solution built right into the chassis already. Why not reuse the design for workflows that need silent operation?
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
There are hundreds if not thousands(?) of PCIe cards in the world: speciality needs galore that can't all "just work" with USB or Thunderbolt dongles. Why Apple went to the trouble of "opening" up ULTRA to have some slots illustrates that Apple knows this themselves. Some will buy these Macs because of the specialized hardware that can go in the slots MORE than Silicon, Apple storage and Apple RAM. In other words, some will have needs to keep the card functional on the Mac platform more than the benefits of the Apple hardware itself.
Others may choose to switch to PC towers where the slots can be the newest version and work with ANY cards instead of only select cards... and those can deal with the RAM cap too.
We consumers tend to have narrow views of how computers can be used. For a typical consumer, things not bolted inside easily hook up to Thunderbolt/USB. However, Mac Pro people are generally not average consumers and things in their slots are not limited to only RAM and Storage expansion or only graphics cards. There's a LOT of speciality computer hardware in the world that plugs into PCI slots that doesn't have a USB or T-bolt equivalent.
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This is one of the weirdest devices Apple has ever released.
I mean, weren't most people using the PCI Express slots for GPUs and Afterburner cards?
$3000 more expensive than a tiny computer that Apple also sells that does 95% of what this thing can do. The only difference is upgradable storage (to Apple's massively overpriced storage modules) and it can take weird PCI Express cards for the 0.1% of you with that fetish.
Why does this thing exist? The point of a desktop tower form factor is to upgrade your system over time.
- Desktop tower
- No upgradeable RAM
- No upgradeable GPU
- No Afterburner cards (doesn't need them)
- Mostly empty inside
- Has a bunch of PCI-Express slots for some reason
I mean, weren't most people using the PCI Express slots for GPUs and Afterburner cards?
$3000 more expensive than a tiny computer that Apple also sells that does 95% of what this thing can do. The only difference is upgradable storage (to Apple's massively overpriced storage modules) and it can take weird PCI Express cards for the 0.1% of you with that fetish.
Why does this thing exist? The point of a desktop tower form factor is to upgrade your system over time.
OP called it ”a blatant ripoff.” Hardly praise.
Is the Mac Pro's Apple I/O card how the PCIe cards communicate with the system?
Perhaps in the future Apple could offer an updated version that will allow GFX card compatibility.
Perhaps in the future Apple could offer an updated version that will allow GFX card compatibility.
Seems like someone at Apple said "just stick a Mac Studio in there with some PCI slots and call it a day so we can say our transition is complete".
This is certainly not a product designed from beginning to end as a "new" Mac Pro. If anything, it should be much smaller than it is. So much wasted space and a $3000 premium. Maybe some Hollywood studios will bite, but this is a niche within a niche.
This is certainly not a product designed from beginning to end as a "new" Mac Pro. If anything, it should be much smaller than it is. So much wasted space and a $3000 premium. Maybe some Hollywood studios will bite, but this is a niche within a niche.
The current Core i9-13900KS already performs better on Geekbench 6 than the M2 Ultra.
Scoring 3,500 in single core and 23,600 on multi core.
But given there is no current Mac Pro that will support any Intel chip, it’s pretty much moot.
Scoring 3,500 in single core and 23,600 on multi core.
But given there is no current Mac Pro that will support any Intel chip, it’s pretty much moot.
Nope, there’s an article from yesterday where they say they specifically designed it without external gpu support. Between this and the non-expandable memory you better really, really need some PCIe cards for this thing to be of any use at all vs the Mac Studio.
So skipping doing bicep curls with the Mac Pro then?I think it has to do with the Size and Mac Pro comes with classy Mac Pro Wheels. In which, Mac Studio doesn't.
I doubt most Apple customers care about those things, as they are not in the market for them. Customers who do need the high end gear likely are far less price sensitive since they make money from teh machines and teh costs of teh machine is small compared to what revenue they will generate.
Exactly. Companies I worked with decided what specs were needed to do the job over the period they planned to keep the machines, and at the end of the period turned them in off-lease or sold them and got new ones.
Single core performance is just that - the performance that is delivered by one single core. Since all M2 family SoCs have the same type of CPU cores, single core performance is generally identical across them all.
apple largely delivered , similar performance to x86 but with much lower power draw. Didn't quite get the top of the range to be comparable on many relevant specs but that really does appear to be an irrelevant space for Apple now. However, i'm really excited that headless mid to high end macs are very much back. No big between the mini and the pro. Really great $1999 machine. Just need a mid range display now so one does not have to go third party.
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
I suspect the rumored "Extreme" was real and thus offered a way for much more (Apple) RAM and much more (Apple) storage but some issue/flaw set that aside and this is "plan B."
I still don't see any technical reason why Apple could NOT basically slot the Silicon boards in Studio so they could have 2-4 of them in this kind of case... then create a "grand central"-like process manager to maximize the availability of multiple "Studios" working together as a Mac Pro. It seems much of the innovation in this would be a software innovation vs. hooking multiple ULTRAS into a single chip.
Along with the processing benefit in one case, this could address big RAM, big SSD, slots etc... and come with the giant 5-digit prices Apple loved to charge in the prior generation.
The most peculiar thing about THIS Mac Pro is there isn't a $100K version, an $80K version, etc... UP from the $50K version when built on Intel. Through a comparative lens Pro vs. Pro, this is bargain priced... which doesn't seem to fit at all with modern Apple Inc.
There should be nobody expecting a lower "starting at..." pre reveal. But take a moment to spec it to the MAX and consider that price vs. the prior Mac Pros MAX.
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Sure. Here's Neil Parfitt, a professional music composer and sound designer for movies who uses a variety of PCIe cards in his MacPro.
Yep exactly. It’s a support and budget nightmare if you have hundreds of various setups. I have been in charge of budgets and upgrades for IT in large companies. They and I forbid upgrades. If an employee computer dies, we have spares on hand to swap out immediately. It gets difficult if every employee has different setup. Departments do. But you still buy a batch at the department level.