I'm laughing about all of the whining here. The small (in terms of market share) group of users this device is intended for are not spending their time looking at or posting on some rumours forum. Instead, they are busy at work and will upgrade if there is a business case to do so. The actual cost they couldn't care less about. To begin with, it's a business expense they can write off and anyway, the increased productivity will pay for the device in a matter of months if not weeks.
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First Benchmark Result Surfaces for Mac Pro With M2 Ultra Chip
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Getting the Pro ASAP to speed up my email and web browsing!! 😂
In the long term you can't have the former without the latter... what makes the Mac Pro even more baffling
Well, DuneCase do a copy of it for $200 .. so I'd take a stab, allowing for Apple Quality and QC at under $200.
However, they also most likely spent many more times the entire net worth of Dune just on R&D.
By such logic, it would be more baffling to not offer a Mac Pro since there are at least some customers who want it and need it.
It saddens me too, but even if I take the most cynical shareholder-beholden view of Apple, I don't understand what they're hoping to accomplish here from a financial perspective. It just doesn't make any sense. That's why I tend to agree with the others that see this Mac Pro as a placeholder to complete their transition to AS, as they failed to meet their original objectives for the machine.
Hopefully we'll see their original vision next year.
Having customers doesn't necessarily mean having the EXACT same set of customers over a long time. Just like don't need the EXACT same set of shareholders over a long time.
As long as Apple has enough customers to make the Mac ecosystem work that is all that matters. If the stockholders or customers churn 15-20% over several years that is really immaterial to that.
Apple isn't trying to make everything for everybody. There is a notion by some that if Apple doesn't take their specific money then Apple is doomed. Probably not true.
People keep claiming Apple has no f**king clue what their Mac customers want, and yet one of the major demands from their "proist of the pro" customers that led to the 2019 Mac Pro was the need for PCIe slots and they actually kept them with the 2023 model. They also just announced a large-screen laptop that is $800 cheaper than their other large-screen laptop (when configured with 16GB/512GB). And they updated the Mac mini with an M2 Pro to offer a powerful desktop that is hundreds less than the Mac Studio and updated the Mac Studio while keeping the base prices for both configurations identical to the M1 models at launch.
I do not dispute that.
I just dispute that customers want a non-upgradeable, non-modular Mac Pro. Anyway, time will tell
So in short, pay an extra $3k for some PCIe slots?? That you can't even use for graphics cards?
Everything about the new Mac Pro is so embarassing for Apple.
Yes. If you want the luxury of putting your cards (of which GPUs are only one use case) into a single very quiet enclosure (rather than an Thunderbolt based external enclosure), you pay for it.
Bigger trucks with longer beds tend to cost more too…
It is upgradable. Multiple internal very high bandwidth storage drives (faster than Apple's) . Multiple network interfaces . An internal 'spinning rust' 20TB HDD ( more than 2x the capacity of Apple's drive).
Those things do matter. They don't have to matter for everybody under the Sun, but they do matter for a substantive number of people.
Some folks are being OCD on what is replaceable ( throwing out Apple's choice for their own) rather than upgrades.
I think what Apple started telling us with the introduction of the Mac Studio is, this is the future of the Mac Pro. If Apple had introduced an Intel version of the Mac Studio in 2013 instead of the trash can, it might have actually gone over well because there would be no thermal constraints. But the trash can left such an awful taste, any subsequent Pro Apple desktop has been tainted by the trash can's legacy. When in fact, its not as evidenced by the performance scores you are seeing between the M2 Ultra Studio and Pro.
Honestly, I would argue that the 2013 Mac Pro was the "Intel Mac Studio". And that Intel and AMD kept pushing up the thermal loads on their CPUs and GPUs to the point that future products could not work within the thermal envelope of the 2013 Mac Pro helped push Apple to develop Apple Silicon for the Mac, alongside the thermal throttling issues with the 2016-2019 MacBook Pro and the relatively anemic performance of the MacBook and MacBook Air due to Intel not being able to get any real performance without requiring real power input/heat output.
Just to drive home the point of "Wow, $3000 is too much to pay". To do a apples-to-apples compare of the Ultra Studio to the 6 slot Mac Pro. $1500 + 800-to-1000 ( Echo IIID or III ) so about $2500. Now have just a $500 gap. ($1000 if switching the Mac Pro to rack case) and still haven't covered adding an internal SATA drive option ( e.g, in-the-box TimeMachine target) that the Mac Pro provides.
The xMac Studio path has a bigger impact when the Max Studio is used for a small number of cards. Once get to Ultra and need more slots... it really isn't that big of a price gap anymore (relative to the system price already committed to).
He says redundant for Audio. Which really isn't generally pressing TBv4 all that hard. Folks with x8 PCI-e v3 (or higher bandwidth footprint) card.... yes Mac Pro still has impact ( no redundancy) .
So yes the pool shrank a bit in areas that really were all that pressed for bandwidth before (in 2017-19). But it isn't 'empty'. There are x16 PCI-e v5 cards coming over next couple of years. There are currently x16 PCI-e v4 card that completely pummel TBv4 and any hand wave TBv5 socket want to claim will 'solve the TB problem".
P.S. there is part in there that is a huge head scratcher.... some audio app that won't read any faster with a bleeding edge SSD than a relatively old drive. Some apps are just going to need some large rewrites for the Mac Pro to make sense. When its "hey you've got a x16 PCI-e v4 SSD ... I'm going to treat that like a x16 PCI-e v2 SSD ... " well yeah the Mac Pro isn't going to add much. But that is saying LOADS more 'WTF' about the software half of that system than the hardware 'half' .
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Don't forget UAD PCIe cards. Available on PC and Mac. There COULD be somebody who uses ProTools and wants to use the UAD effects. But I think UAD is moving away from DSP processing, particularly with regards to their new subscription version of all their effects.
Sticking with my 2019 Cheese Grater/16-core/96GB/1TB. Does exactly what I need it to and can flex up without constraints if needed. Thank you, Apple, for keeping my investment relevant.
Interesting! Thank you for posting. Maybe, someone can label remaining parts
The biggest downside to the i9-13900KS is that it is limited to 128GB of DRAM according to the ARK. Not sure if it supports more than that, unofficially, but this is an artificial limit that Intel puts on their consumer CPUs.
I think the point of a workstation is largely flexibility within a large organization. IT does their best to spec out the best machine per department, which often helps to standardize so that replacement parts and tracking is easier. From there, customs additions like extra ram, storage, better video cards, add in cards etc can be doled out based on production needs.
Every company I've worked for did it this way. This new Mac Pro makes it much more difficult to deploy, as IT would have to cover for worst-case scenario ahead of time, which would baloon the cost of entry as there is no upgrade path whatsoever. You would think Apple would have learned this mistake on the Trash Can Mac Pro, but here we are again.