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Yebubbleman

macrumors 603
May 20, 2010
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Then:
3) You're crazy.

Sounds like your take on the demographic of folks buying this machine are less than accurate.

And he doesn't pay for it himself either. There you have it.

Mac Pros are generally not priced for average folks to pay for it themselves. I don't know about you, but I generally don't have $7000 lying around for a base model Mac Pro, let alone $10,000+ for a customized one. If I did, it would be because I owned my own business, in which case, the business would be the one buying it, not me. That's not the kind of money the average person has to spend on a computer.
 

mode11

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Jul 14, 2015
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But, more to your point, I think they more care about performance per watt than they do about just raw performance.

More specifically, they care about the vast numbers of laptops they sell, with the Mac Pro being an afterthought.

But, Apple only cares about their next machine beating out their previous and, for whatever reason, they believed that this machine was enough.

Again, they mainly care about their laptops, and cater for their top desktop using two of their best laptop chips. It's got nothing to do with what's 'enough'; it's what they have - take it or leave it. If the Ultra thrashed the latest Xeons, they'd be singing it from the rooftops. But it doesn't, so they don't.
 

Yebubbleman

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More specifically, they care about the vast numbers of laptops they sell, with the Mac Pro being an afterthought.

I don't know that I'd say that the Mac Pro is an afterthought as much as I'd say that it's designed to be an extension of the Mac Studio rather than the apex Mac predator that it was (at least from 2006-2010 and from 2019 until the Apple Silicon Transition was underway).

Yes, performance-per-watt, as an engineering priority, will always benefit laptops more. However, let's not forget that something like the Mac Studio would not have been possible with Intel inside. Similarly, the M2 Mac mini also provides the kind of performance you'd never otherwise see in that form factor with Intel/AMD/x86-64 or PowerPC.

Again, they mainly care about their laptops, and cater for their top desktop using two of their best laptop chips. It's got nothing to do with what's 'enough'; it's what they have - take it or leave it. If the Ultra thrashed the latest Xeons, they'd be singing it from the rooftops. But it doesn't, so they don't.

I agree that they're lowering the bar when it comes to peak desktop performance relative to what else is out there.

However, I totally disagree that "what's enough" isn't the key relevant point here. Apple couldn't put out an Apple Silicon Mac Pro that didn't outperform the 2019 Mac Pro. They clearly didn't put out anything to outperform what would've gone into a would-be 2023 Intel Mac Pro. They also didn't produce an M1 Ultra Mac Pro either, presumably because it wasn't enough. So, somewhere along the line, they decided that what M2 Ultra had to offer would be enough to release and supplant the 2019 Mac Pro.
 

mode11

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I don't know that I'd say that the Mac Pro is an afterthought as much as I'd say that it's designed to be an extension of the Mac Studio

That's not much of a difference. Why was it only "designed to be an extension of the Mac Studio"? How minor an extension would it have to be before you'd accept they hadn't made much effort? What if it had a single PCIe slot? (Which isn't far from the truth - it only has a single 16x slot worth of total bandwidth.)


Yes, performance-per-watt, as an engineering priority, will always benefit laptops more. However, let's not forget that something like the Mac Studio would not have been possible with Intel inside. Similarly, the M2 Mac mini also provides the kind of performance you'd never otherwise see in that form factor with Intel/AMD/x86-64 or PowerPC.

OK, but we're talking about the Mac Pro here. Also, pleasant though the Studio is, I expect many people would prefer a compact desktop / under desk chassis that could take a GPU. The Studio's design is merely utilitarian; just a vertically stretched Mac mini, with space for a large HSF to cool one or two MBP chips.


I agree that they're lowering the bar when it comes to peak desktop performance relative to what else is out there.

However, I totally disagree that "what's enough" isn't the key relevant point here. Apple couldn't put out an Apple Silicon Mac Pro that didn't outperform the 2019 Mac Pro. They clearly didn't put out anything to outperform what would've gone into a would-be 2023 Intel Mac Pro.

OK. But it's not sounding very impressive so far.

They also didn't produce an M1 Ultra Mac Pro either, presumably because it wasn't enough. So, somewhere along the line, they decided that what M2 Ultra had to offer would be enough to release and supplant the 2019 Mac Pro.

So the 2023 M2 Ultra (though not the M1 Ultra, which is only ~25% slower) met the bare minimum to be a credible successor to the 2019 Mac Pro? Not exactly reaching for the stars.

When I said it's not about what's 'enough', I think I meant it in a different way to you. Your definition seems akin to 'more than enough' i.e. no need to waste resources building something more powerful than the majority of their customers need.

From my point of view, Apple didn't establish what's 'necessary', before working backwards from there. They started from a position where it was completely out of the question they would make anything custom for the Mac Pro. All they could do was look in the parts bin, squint, and see if it would clear a minimum bar.
 

jimmy_john

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Jun 28, 2023
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The Mac Pro’s goal is to replace Windows workstations. Not supplement them.

That is debatable.

Never in its history has the Mac Pro been at the top of the general compute workstation food chain. Not the 2019, not the 2009-2012, not the G5. So I really don’t understand why people are so stunned that isn’t the case this time as well. New to the Mac Pro scene maybe?

The Mac Pro has always been the machine for those who want to run Mac OS for whatever reason and do so in the fastest way available.
 
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Yebubbleman

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That's not much of a difference. Why was it only "designed to be an extension of the Mac Studio"? How minor an extension would it have to be before you'd accept they hadn't made much effort? What if it had a single PCIe slot? (Which isn't far from the truth - it only has a single 16x slot worth of total bandwidth.)




OK, but we're talking about the Mac Pro here. Also, pleasant though the Studio is, I expect many people would prefer a compact desktop / under desk chassis that could take a GPU. The Studio's design is merely utilitarian; just a vertically stretched Mac mini, with space for a large HSF to cool one or two MBP chips.


The comment of yours that I replied to asserted that Apple only cares about laptops. While not exactly prioritizing the Mac Pro, you can't say that they're not using Apple Silicon to innovate in the desktop space. Just that they're not innovating in the workstation tower space.

OK. But it's not sounding very impressive so far.

Incidentally, I never said it was. I said that Apple considered it to be enough.

So the 2023 M2 Ultra (though not the M1 Ultra, which is only ~25% slower) met the bare minimum to be a credible successor to the 2019 Mac Pro? Not exactly reaching for the stars.

First off, everything I've read about M2 Ultra compared to M1 Ultra pegs the performance difference closer to the 50-100% faster range than 25% (though, given that both Ultra chips require software to be optimized for them, I'd imagine one's mileage will vary).

Second off, considering Apple thought that M1 Ultra outperformed the 28-core Xeon from 2019 by 60%, it makes sense that they deemed M2 Ultra fast enough to replace it. Though, I completely agree that only aiming to be "twice as fast" as the 2019 Xeon is a poorly low bar compared to "twice as fast as today's equivalent to the 2019 Xeon". Then again, I'd imagine that the degree to which M2 Ultra is or isn't faster than any given x86-64 CPU is entirely based on whether or not Apple has optimized it for the given workload. Much of the performance comparisons are seeming like Apples and Oranges comparisons now that (a) we're dealing with two different processor architectures running two different operating systems again and (b) Apple is optimizing Apple Silicon for specific workloads rather than overall workload-agnostic performance.

When I said it's not about what's 'enough', I think I meant it in a different way to you. Your definition seems akin to 'more than enough' i.e. no need to waste resources building something more powerful than the majority of their customers need.

Again, it's not MY definition of "enough". It's Apple's. And yes, if you are Apple and you are building this product to serve specific needs, building more than is deemed enough might not be worth it.

Incidentally, I'm guessing that 192GB was a magic number of RAM for Apple as it served the vast majority of Mac Pro customers (and that Apple only ever offered more than that for the 2019 Mac Pro because that's what that particular generation/flavor of Intel's Xeon could accommodate rather than there being a ton of customers who needed more than 192GB of RAM [though, I don't doubt that there are Mac Pro customers that NEED that much RAM to adequately function]). Apple did put out a white paper on the 2019 Mac Pro that recommended users with (what they thought was) the highest-end workflows only add in that much RAM.

From my point of view, Apple didn't establish what's 'necessary', before working backwards from there. They started from a position where it was completely out of the question they would make anything custom for the Mac Pro. All they could do was look in the parts bin, squint, and see if it would clear a minimum bar.
That's entirely possible. I'd imagine that they did want to make the "Extreme", but decided to table it and that M2 Ultra would've sufficed for enough customers and for long enough that they could figure out what to do next from there without starting the kind of 2013 Mac Pro crisis that they did last decade.
 

mode11

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Jul 14, 2015
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The comment of yours that I replied to asserted that Apple only cares about laptops. While not exactly prioritizing the Mac Pro, you can't say that they're not using Apple Silicon to innovate in the desktop space. Just that they're not innovating in the workstation tower space.

I do agree that the Studio's performance (certainly in CPU) is very impressive for its size / power. This is more a welcome side effect of the chips' mobile origins (a desktop doesn't need to be that small), but it is a benefit nonetheless.


First off, everything I've read about M2 Ultra compared to M1 Ultra pegs the performance difference closer to the 50-100% faster range than 25% (though, given that both Ultra chips require software to be optimized for them, I'd imagine one's mileage will vary).

I don't think the generational improvement is quite that impressive, aside perhaps for very specific tasks (e.g. number of simultaneous 8K video streams that can be compressed). From a quick look, 25% seemed in the ballpark for average performance gains.


Second off, considering Apple thought that M1 Ultra outperformed the 28-core Xeon from 2019 by 60%, it makes sense that they deemed M2 Ultra fast enough to replace it. Though, I completely agree that only aiming to be "twice as fast" as the 2019 Xeon is a poorly low bar compared to "twice as fast as today's equivalent to the 2019 Xeon". Then again, I'd imagine that the degree to which M2 Ultra is or isn't faster than any given x86-64 CPU is entirely based on whether or not Apple has optimized it for the given workload. Much of the performance comparisons are seeming like Apples and Oranges comparisons now that (a) we're dealing with two different processor architectures running two different operating systems again and (b) Apple is optimizing Apple Silicon for specific workloads rather than overall workload-agnostic performance.

ASi CPU performance is certainly impressive. The big issue is with GPU though. The 2019 MP may be stuck with last-gen AMD cards, but they are beefy and it can fit a lot of them in there. And of course, PCs have current-gen Nvidia, which will shred an Ultra in this regard.


Again, it's not MY definition of "enough". It's Apple's. And yes, if you are Apple and you are building this product to serve specific needs, building more than is deemed enough might not be worth it.

Fair enough, acknowledged.


Incidentally, I'm guessing that 192GB was a magic number of RAM for Apple as it served the vast majority of Mac Pro customers (and that Apple only ever offered more than that for the 2019 Mac Pro because that's what that particular generation/flavor of Intel's Xeon could accommodate rather than there being a ton of customers who needed more than 192GB of RAM [though, I don't doubt that there are Mac Pro customers that NEED that much RAM to adequately function]). Apple did put out a white paper on the 2019 Mac Pro that recommended users with (what they thought was) the highest-end workflows only add in that much RAM.

Good point. RAM capacity may have been as much of a bar as anything else. I agree that 192GB likely caters for the vast majority of customers. Even if unified RAM works differently etc., it would have been hard to get customers to (spend a lot of money) upgrading to a machine with less RAM.


That's entirely possible. I'd imagine that they did want to make the "Extreme", but decided to table it and that M2 Ultra would've sufficed for enough customers and for long enough that they could figure out what to do next from there without starting the kind of 2013 Mac Pro crisis that they did last decade.

An Extreme would be a logical extension of the current paradigm. It will be interesting to see if the M3 gets one. Perhaps it will be more akin to a dual-socket design, with 2 Ultras, rather than a true 4-die chip linked with UltraFusion (which would seem to require a separate Max variant with additional UF links - and is there even space on its sides?).

At the very least though, it seems that Apple went full-steam ahead with the transition without knowing if an Extreme was really feasible. I think they were only willing to take this risk because at the end of the day, the MP isn't that important to them; if they had known for certain that it would never be possible, I doubt it would have affected their plans at all. The transition had too many other upsides to them.
 

Jethro!

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Oct 4, 2015
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Sounds like your take on the demographic of folks buying this machine are less than accurate.
You're assuming people are buying it.
But if there are a handful, yes, they're crazy.
Mac Pros are generally not priced for average folks to pay for it themselves. I don't know about you, but I generally don't have $7000 lying around for a base model Mac Pro, let alone $10,000+ for a customized one. If I did, it would be because I owned my own business, in which case, the business would be the one buying it, not me. That's not the kind of money the average person has to spend on a computer.
Not true. Independent pros will save up their pennies for a new monster machine --> if it's upgradable. It must be machine with longevity. This one is not.
No sane indie pro will pay premium prices for disposable computers. Fan boys won't stay in business.
 
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jimmy_john

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Jun 28, 2023
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The rich irony.

I've never claimed that my needs are the same as others here or that my workflow is more "pro" than anyone else.

That would be a pretty myopic thing to do.

Same can't be said for everyone though, right?

The unqualified proclamations many are making here of a machine being an unmitigated failure are lacking any context and - more importantly - experience. It's amusing to me so I'm just having fun with the foaming-at-the-mouth hatred of a computer.
 
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ZombiePhysicist

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I've never claimed that my needs are the same as others here or that my workflow is more "pro" than anyone else.

That would be a pretty myopic thing to do.

Same can't be said for everyone though, right?

The unqualified proclamations many are making here of a machine being an unmitigated failure are lacking any context and - more importantly - experience. It's amusing to me so I'm just having fun with the foaming-at-the-mouth hatred of a computer.

"unqualified proclamations". It's a veritable irony festival.
 
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Jethro!

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Is it more arrogant of Apple to make a machine you do not like or of you to project that your needs are those of everyone?
What?? The Mac Pro/Power Mac has had a history, and upgradability and expandability has nearly always been a part of it. (*cough* trash can *cough cough*). This one arrogantly says "Screw you!" to those who had supported and relied on that platform over the decades.
 
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jimmy_john

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Jun 28, 2023
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What?? The Mac Pro/Power Mac has had a history, and upgradability and expandability has nearly always been a part of it. (*cough* trash can *cough cough*). This one arrogantly says "Screw you!" to those who had supported and relied on that platform over the decades.

Lest we all forget the decades of ECC ram and bountiful GPU upgrade options in the Power Mac Era! lol
 
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goMac

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Apr 15, 2004
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That is debatable.

...what? This makes my brain hurt.

The Mac Pro was literally a Xeon class workstation that could run Windows as a secondary operating system. It was, tier for tier, component to component an equal to a PC workstation. And if you really weren't convinced you could load Windows onto the exact same hardware and run it as a Windows workstation.

For years I didn't need to buy Windows machines because I had a Mac Pro.

(And I know we can quibble about GeForce vs Radeon but even that seems like small potatoes compared to where we are now.)

Never in its history has the Mac Pro been at the top of the general compute workstation food chain.

Again, we can quibble about Radeon vs GeForce but other than that it used _the exact same parts as a PC workstation._
 

jimmy_john

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Jun 28, 2023
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...what? This makes my brain hurt.

The Mac Pro was literally a Xeon class workstation that could run Windows as a secondary operating system. It was, tier for tier, component to component an equal to a PC workstation. And if you really weren't convinced you could load Windows onto the exact same hardware and run it as a Windows workstation.

For years I didn't need to buy Windows machines because I had a Mac Pro.

(And I know we can quibble about GeForce vs Radeon but even that seems like small potatoes compared to where we are now.)

The 2019 Mac Pro wasn't even performance competitive with the best commonly available Windows workstations at its launch.
 
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goMac

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Lest we all forget the decades of ECC ram and bountiful GPU upgrade options in the Power Mac Era! lol

The GPU upgrade options in the Power Mac era were actually pretty good. Even compared to the 2019 Mac Pro.

The Power Mac G5 supported ECC memory. It was added specifically because major customers asked for it.

So I'm not sure what you're talking about.
 

goMac

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The 2019 Mac Pro wasn't even performance competitive with the best commonly available Windows workstations at its launch.

This needs citation in a big way.

There were complaints about AMD vs Intel. But that's true of any PC workstation - that's not a Mac vs PC thing.

There were complaints about price. All of which still apply to the Apple Silicon version.
 

jimmy_john

macrumors member
Jun 28, 2023
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This guy doesn't even pay for his own machines, let alone use it exclusively/primarily.
His opinion doesn't count.

Man, I wish I got them for free. That would be awesome.

I've used nearly every generation of Apple tower (whether labeled 'pro' or not by the forum) professionally since the 9500 and a similar number of Windows workstations. The oldest one still in somewhat regular service is a 2010 Mac Pro but that is more for nostalgia. It's not really worth the power draw in practice. I do wish I still had the 9500. That was a beast in its day.
 
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Yebubbleman

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I do agree that the Studio's performance (certainly in CPU) is very impressive for its size / power. This is more a welcome side effect of the chips' mobile origins (a desktop doesn't need to be that small), but it is a benefit nonetheless.

Of course. Though, Apple is more concerned with besting the prior models than they are with besting the competition. Hence, the asininely vague graphs and comparisons to "the latest/most popular PC chip". If there was a superstar x86-64 CPU that Apple could directly say "look, this outperforms this CPU in every possible way" they'd probably have done so. Instead, it's shrouded in kludgy marketing.

Obviously, you can take an M1 MacBook Air, compare it to the 2020 10th Gen Intel Y-series based MacBook Air and say "look, this thing is universally faster in every possible way." But, relative to how crappy those specific processors were, that's really not saying much.

Similarly, you take a 2020 27-inch iMac and compare it to an M1 Max Mac Studio, it's going to be sizably faster; and that's the only comparison that matters to Apple's marketing (despite the fact that a contemporary Intel processor designed for the desktop form factor that the 10th Generation Intel processors in that iMac were designed for might be more closely matched to the M1 Max).

Apple's greatest gains with Apple Silicon are always going to be in notebooks. There's no debate there. I concede that the gains won't be as great with desktops, but I'd imagine Apple will still make Mac Studio models that iterate on performance over their predecessors.

I don't think the generational improvement is quite that impressive, aside perhaps for very specific tasks (e.g. number of simultaneous 8K video streams that can be compressed). From a quick look, 25% seemed in the ballpark for average performance gains.


There are benchmarks that will show impressive gains. Just as I'm sure that there will be some that don't. Again, Apple is optimizing the performance of these SoCs to specific workloads. It stands to reason that some will be markedly more powerful while others will not.

ASi CPU performance is certainly impressive. The big issue is with GPU though.

They definitely have more room to grow there. But, it also seems as though Apple is trying to compensate for that with custom accelerators that augment specific tasks such that the GPUs themselves do not need to work anywhere near as hard on their own. I'm not saying that this negates the need, or even the benefit of a more powerful GPU. Just that it's probably the case that the workloads Apple is targeting in their optimizations are not as affected by their GPUs not being as powerful as contemporary ones made by the competition (which, inherently, have to do much more heavy lifting to accomplish similar results).

The 2019 MP may be stuck with last-gen AMD cards, but they are beefy and it can fit a lot of them in there.

I think that depends on your workflow. I know that, when Apple was re-evaluating their mistakes with the 2013 Mac Pro, one of the things they realized is that most of their customers actually didn't need multiple GPUs. They accommodated for it beautifully as an option with the 2019 model, but never forced it upon anyone. I'm just guessing, but I think that much of the results of their surveying the damage from the 2013 Mac Pro (and assessment of what was bare minimum for a viable replacement) informed the minimum bar of entry for a replacement. Incidentally, M2 Ultra IS two M2 Max chips fused onto a single package.

Not saying that a 2019 Mac Pro isn't potentially benefited by TWO Duo cards; just that the likelihood is that the number of people who saw serious benefit from that kind of configuration was REALLY small and better served by Windows workstations than Apple would ever want to do with a Mac Pro.

And of course, PCs have current-gen Nvidia, which will shred an Ultra in this regard.

Well, yeah. That's pretty much a given, at this point.


Good point. RAM capacity may have been as much of a bar as anything else. I agree that 192GB likely caters for the vast majority of customers. Even if unified RAM works differently etc., it would have been hard to get customers to (spend a lot of money) upgrading to a machine with less RAM.

I totally agree that 192GB as a maximum RAM capacity (compared to 768GB for 8-16 Core 2019 Mac Pros or 1.5TB for 24 or 28 Core 2019 Mac Pros) is bad optics. Then again, spending even 192GB of RAM in a 2019 Mac Pro would've been extremely expensive and not something a user or business would've done lightly. We also got those RAM capacities due to the Xeons supporting them more than because Apple thought it was something users needed. Again, Apple's whitepaper on the 2019 Mac Pro strongly suggests that they fully believed that 192GB was the most that would be needed on the highest end of workflows.

An Extreme would be a logical extension of the current paradigm. It will be interesting to see if the M3 gets one. Perhaps it will be more akin to a dual-socket design, with 2 Ultras, rather than a true 4-die chip linked with UltraFusion (which would seem to require a separate Max variant with additional UF links - and is there even space on its sides?).

UltraFusion would seem to be vastly preferable from the standpoint of latency between SoC components. Then again, I'm not exactly sure why they're not offering the lesser M2 SoCs on compute cards. Fine that they don't communicate as fast as if they were the same organism; why wouldn't an M2 Ultra Mac Pro with 192GB of RAM and 76 GPU cores NOT benefit from an M2 Pro with the full 12-core CPU and 19-core GPU with 32GB of RAM on a compute card doing its own tasks on the side?

At the very least though, it seems that Apple went full-steam ahead with the transition without knowing if an Extreme was really feasible. I think they were only willing to take this risk because at the end of the day, the MP isn't that important to them; if they had known for certain that it would never be possible, I doubt it would have affected their plans at all. The transition had too many other upsides to them.

Nah. They saw the 24-core CPU, the 60-76 core GPU with 7 Afterburner cards' worth of accelerator performance, and the 64-192GB of RAM and decided that it was enough to suffice for the vast majority of the customers that would need this class of machine. It's not that the Mac Pro isn't important to them. It's that, TO THEM, the Mac Pro does not need to be anything more than an Ultra variant of a Mac Studio with I/O that would only be possible in the configuration of a tower. If Apple did the research and found that most of the people needing to buy a Mac Pro really only needed what this 2023 Mac Pro has to offer, then it was merely a calculated risk as to just how many customers they'd alienate by nixing the added upgradability from the 2019 model.

Though, I don't agree with it, I'm guessing that, unlike in 2013, they actually calculated intelligently this time.


You're assuming people are buying it.
But if there are a handful, yes, they're crazy.

It sounds like there ARE people buying it. Just not anyone that wouldn't otherwise be just fine on an M2 Ultra model of Mac Studio. But, this Mac Pro was never meant for those people; rendering that point utterly moot. If you need to slap in a $7000 broadcast/capture card into a Mac, this is really the only option. If you don't have any need for PCIe cards, what are you even doing talking about this machine?

Not true. Independent pros will save up their pennies for a new monster machine --> if it's upgradable.

Upgradeability adds value. I won't deny this. However, upgradability is far from the only value to a Mac Pro and it completely pales in comparison to the value added by I/O. Yes, you have to pay Apple's RAM tax to buy more RAM up front. That part sucks. But that really won't stop this machine from being sold to anyone for whom that isn't an absolute deal-breaker.

It must be machine with longevity. This one is not.

Considering that (a) the 2010 and 2013 Mac Pros are tied at 8 years for longest-supported Mac Pro models, (b) it is extremely unlikely that the 2019 Mac Pro will have that much time being supported, and (c) that we have absolutely no metric for how long Apple Silicon Macs will last before not being able to run a macOS version, I'd say your claim has issues.

Furthermore, the only way in which this machine lacks longevity is with GPU and RAM upgrades (which never really did all that much to extend the overall life of even 2010 and 2012 Mac Pros relative to the rest of the system to begin with). Yes, you could squeeze a bit more performance out of a 2010 or 2012 Mac Pro with those upgrades, but again, you're still chipset limited. The best that 580X card in a 2012 Mac Pro would do is give you the illusion that it's still worth holding on to that 2012 Mac Pro (when it's actually a much better idea to move on).


No sane indie pro will pay premium prices for disposable computers. Fan boys won't stay in business.

Apple has made killings off of indie pros paying premium prices for disposable computers for decades. Indie pros didn't balk when Apple started soldering the SSDs into 15-inch MacBook Pros. Indie pros have never balked at the fact that the drives are not user-replaceable in a 27-inch iMac. And no one HAS EVER balked at the fact that ANY Mac Pro or Power Mac HAS EVER allowed you to swap out one generation of system board (and therefore processor and RAM type) for another which, if we're REALLY being honest here, is what truly makes ANY Mac ultimately disposable.

The Mac Pro was literally a Xeon class workstation that could run Windows as a secondary operating system.

Until Apple activates the TPM 2.0 latent on all 2018 and later Macs (give or take adding Secure Boot functionality to the 2019 iMacs) and releases Windows 11 compatible Boot Camp drivers, it's limited to Windows 10, which is only supported for another two more years. Compare that to any other 2019 era Windows workstation which can absolutely run Windows 11 with no question.

My point is that if we're talking about Xeon workstations that can run Windows in a supported configuration, a Mac Pro is subpar compared to its contemporary Xeon-based alternatives.


It was, tier for tier, component to component an equal to a PC workstation.

This is debatable. First off, there are TONS of different sizes, shapes, and feature sets across the myriad of Xeon based workstations you can buy. At the time, HP had the Z4, Z6, and Z8 workstations that all offered very different degrees of performance. Dell has a similar array of Precision towers. Other than maximum RAM capacity differences between the 16 (and fewer) core models and the 24 (or 28) core models, it was the same Mac Pro with the same features. Incidentally, I'm pretty sure that the mid-higher tier Z and Precisions had more capabilities as Windows boxes than the 2019 Mac Pro had as a Mac, let alone as a PC.

Secondly, the Xeon was one used in PCs. The UEFI and some of the other common system board components were probably similar. But, that Mac Pro had a lot of proprietary Apple nonsense in them. The T2 chip and its proprietary SSDs are a fantastic example of this.

And if you really weren't convinced you could load Windows onto the exact same hardware and run it as a Windows workstation.

Again, up to Windows 10 which only has two more years of supported life left in it and with no supported way of running Windows 11.
Again, we can quibble about Radeon vs GeForce but other than that it used _the exact same parts as a PC workstation._

The guy you are replying to is right, though. The Mac Pro was never the best Xeon workstation, let alone for its price. Lack of NVIDIA cards is a big reason, but far from the only one.


The GPU upgrade options in the Power Mac era were actually pretty good. Even compared to the 2019 Mac Pro.

They paled in comparison to the 2008-2012 Mac Pro era. They were only good compared to the 2019 Mac Pro era in that, by that point, you were pretty much limited to AMD cards, the best of which used a proprietary slot that was only good on the 2019 Mac Pro (and useless literally everywhere else).

The Power Mac G5 supported ECC memory. It was added specifically because major customers asked for it.

So I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Only the final (Late 2005/Dual-Core CPU) generation of Power Mac G5 had ECC support (didn't know this until I looked it up in MacTracker just now). All other Power Macs (G5 or otherwise) before didn't have it, which still speaks to the point of the person you replied to made.


This needs citation in a big way.

There were complaints about AMD vs Intel. But that's true of any PC workstation - that's not a Mac vs PC thing.

There were complaints about price. All of which still apply to the Apple Silicon version.
Go look up Dell Precision and HP Z workstations circa 2019. Apple offered ONE machine (technically two if you count the 8-16 core vs. 24 & 28 core split). That machine wasn't the apex predator of the Xeon workstations that were out there nor equivalent to the ones that were.
 
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