Don't know if that was a rhetorical question. If it was, then rhetorical answer...
Yes, but second hand purchases are a thing, and in lieu of Apple ever making a mid-priced expandable tower, a used Mac Pro is the closest people can get. So developments here are relevant to people other than Pixar.
The problem with that is the implication for macOS as a platform. It basically says that the only form factors that are profitable for Apple to make are laptops and SFF desktops. That may be so, but that's Apple's problem - it leaves a large number of use cases which can only be filled by Windows PCs. Which makes it hard for an organisation to be Mac-only, and easy to be Windows-only.
Not specifically "picking" on @terminator-jq, so don't take it that way LOL. If Apple wants to allow for upgradeable RAM for the "new" MacPro, they could easily do this by making a distinct SOC for the Pro line, that does not include the RAM on package. Instead it could have a (very) high-speed bus that connects to a series of expandable "sockets" on the logic board. These sockets could support as much memory as they want to, and would allow for custom configuration and potential upgrade after purchase. The biggest advantage brought by the current method of on-package, is the amount of bandwidth they are able to achieve that wouldn't be possible with current DIMM specifications. Which means the expandable MacPro RAM would have to be custom/proprietary to the MacPro in order to meet these requirements. This would also give Apple total control over quality and allow them to guarantee the performance. Incidentally this is a nice segue to my next point.....
Because Apple is lazy. Or, to borrow a business term, they prefer to optimize their resources. They’d rather only develop for one architecture. The rest of us be damned.
Not what’s going on here at all. Way to misrepresent the argument.
Say, you're kidding, Mac Studio is a toy. Have you seen the performance of Intel's 13th generation and the capabilities of the NVIDIA 4000 series cards?
Except that no-one is going to be sticking GTX4090 level silicon inside an SoC, with all the other stuff. So regardless of the advantages you mention (which are real), there is a downside to the SoC approach too.
Exactly. We’re talking about imperceptible differences to the human mind. Give us our f****** expandable machine, Apple.
I guess my point is: what portion of "Creative Professionals" do Ray Tracing? OK, there's a market for animation and CGI, but the extent to which "Pros" (doing every other type of thing) need a Mac Pro is decreasing each year.
Doesn't Intel help design Thunderbolt? If so, the wait may be due to them. And since the PCIe 6.0 spec is out now, I personally wouldn't mind jumping the boat and use that in the next generation of Thunderbolt.
Steve Jobs insisted to Steve Wozniak that they (Apple) have end-to-end control (much to Woz's ire). IIRC, it was something he insisted on till the very end?
Trust me you don't want to know, not even close to NVIDIA's capabilities, and I didn't take into account RAY TRACING support.
I think it’s just a cycle humans go through. People excited about the Mac were likely not understood by folks that, in their youth, were excited about the Apple II. While I’m hoping this doesn’t come to pass, I imagine that, at some point in the future, I, too might think that nothing about Apple is exciting anymore. It’s harder to be excited after experiencing so much “life” that, in some ways, is more exciting.
Good question. Other than Mac Pro's, Macs really haven't been user-upgradeable since Apple silicon. I guess we come here for the snazzy industrial design and Mac ecosystem … and stay here for the same.
That was what I was implying on my earlier post. When you think of the benefits of using unified memory with a SoC, you come to realize the older populate memory or plug in a SSD replacement just wastes too much space with designs. Also consider the thermal efficiency of not having things laid out with lower heat pipes that dissipates across multiple chips like some laptop designs. Apple can certainly make a modular AS platform computer, it's just a question of how the chassis that this goes in would look like. I was thinking of more like some traditional slotted STE's I've used, not the same old PC tower designs.
