Mac Pro Enthusiasts Raise Concerns Over Upgrade Limitations of Apple Silicon

[sunny5]

Is the Mac Pro Doomed? Maybe... we'll see if Apple ships it. If they ship it, it is probably not doomed.

Should Pro users like yourself be concerned? If you need a Mac Pro with more than 512GB of RAM, you should be FAR more than concerned... you should be making plans to leave the platform and give up on Apple.

Such a joke. This is why Mac will never be good compared to PC.

Currently, even GPU performance is extremely poor compared to Nvidia as M2 series are not even close to RTX 30 series. Beside, most software are Nvidia based or friendly such as CUDA. Mac is just too limited and yet, Apple is not even trying their best which is a huge concern. Is this another Mac Pro 2013 situation? Huh?

Are we still justifying poor hardware performance and specification just because it's Mac and it's special? Wake up people.

 

[Alan Wynn]

My work place got a lot of them since 2019.

Great. How were they configured? How often have they been upgraded since they were purchased? In what industry do you work?

 

[Vref]

Hasn’t lack of being able to wrench under the hood always been a Apple thing?

 

[DavidSchaub]

Such a joke. This is why Mac will never be good compared to PC.

Currently, even GPU performance is extremely poor compared to Nvidia as M2 series are not even close to RTX 30 series. Beside, most software are Nvidia based or friendly such as CUDA. Mac is just too limited and yet, Apple is not even trying their best which is a huge concern. Is this another Mac Pro 2013 situation? Huh?

Are we still justifying poor hardware performance and specification just because it's Mac and it's special? Wake up people.

I don't grok why people who seem to have written of the Mac bother posting on this forum? Why not spend your time on some other internet site?

An M1 Ultra is probably somewhere in the ball park of an 3060. Had the M1 Quadra shipped, it would probably be around the power of a 3080.

An M3 Quadra, presuming it actually ships, will probably be around a 3090.

Will that be leading edge, absolutely not. Will be be enough for people who WANT A MAC to survive alright? Absolutely.

If you want performance more than a Mac, go buy a PC and give up on this forum.

 

[lepidotós]

Hasn’t lack of being able to wrench under the hood always been a Apple thing?

Do you mean when the LC 575 had a motherboard on a slide out tray, when the Power Macintosh G3 introduced a case that had a pull out tab to open the side of the door to access the internals on a swing down door, or when the polycarbonate MacBook had its SSD and RAM kept behind one bracket, screwed in with captive screws and clearly labelled how to access them, a marked improvement from the iBook that needed various special screwdrivers to get into for a hard drive replacement but at the tradeoff of having the top of the logic board accessible by just pulling some tabs on the keyboard?​

 

[Vref]

Do you mean when the LC 575 had a motherboard on a slide out tray, when the Power Macintosh G3 introduced a case that had a pull out tab to open the side of the door to access the internals on a swing down door, or when the polycarbonate MacBook had its SSD and RAM kept behind one bracket, screwed in with captive screws and clearly labelled how to access them, a marked improvement from the iBook that needed various special screwdrivers to get into for a hard drive replacement but at the tradeoff of having the top of the logic board accessible by just pulling some tabs on the keyboard?​

Compared to all of the cases I have used of my builds, that’s not really that impressive

How’s a MacBook compare to say a gaming laptop for upgradeability and power for the dollar?

 

[lepidotós]

How’s a MacBook compare to say a gaming laptop for upgradeability and power for the dollar?

Pretty good, I bought my 2,1 Libreboot testbook for $35 and it does everything you'd want to do with a 13 inch laptop without struggling. You can bump the RAM up to four times what it shipped with and throw in a 2TB SSD and it should feel like new. I've seen gaming laptops in the $10,000 range for higher part numbers (i7-11700, RTX 3090) that don't mean much in the real world due to thermal constriction.
But that's not the point, the point is that Macs have demonstrably backslid in what maintainability and upgrade potential they did historically have since around 2013.​

 

[DavidSchaub]

How’s a MacBook compare to say a gaming laptop for upgradeability and power for the dollar?

That's easy:

- MacBooks suck at upgradeability, so if you want that, look elsewhere

- MacBooks excel at power for the watt. If that is your requirement, they compare well; if not, they don't.

- That being said, buying a Mac for gaming is just silly talk.

To each their own...

 

[DavidSchaub]

But that's not the point, the point is that Macs have demonstrably backslid in what maintainability and upgrade potential they did historically have since around 2013.​

It's not really "backslid", as it is clearly intentional: Apple is picking different tradeoffs and upgradability is never coming back.

That being said, expandability might, in terms of PCIe on the rumoured Mac Pro.

 

[lepidotós]

Apple is picking different tradeoffs and upgradability is never coming back.

Say what you want about UMA and on-chip memory, not using M.2 for their storage and just soldering NANDs to the board has effectively zero good justification that I know of. That's the main issue for me as NANDs do have a finite operating lifespan, however long it may be if you're writing 20GB/day (erasing counts as writing).​

 

[sunny5]

I don't grok why people who seem to have written of the Mac bother posting on this forum? Why not spend your time on some other internet site?

An M1 Ultra is probably somewhere in the ball park of an 3060. Had the M1 Quadra shipped, it would probably be around the power of a 3080.

An M3 Quadra, presuming it actually ships, will probably be around a 3090.

Will that be leading edge, absolutely not. Will be be enough for people who WANT A MAC to survive alright? Absolutely.

If you want performance more than a Mac, go buy a PC and give up on this forum.

Wrong, Mac already loses so many 3D and AI software just because of apple silicon and poor performance. You only justifying Mac that is specialized only for few industry. For example, there are quite a lot of people using Mac Pro 2019 for 3D works and half of software they are using dont even support Apple Silicon Mac. And they work for Disney. Limiting hardware and software will kill the pro market again just like Mac Pro 2013 did for several years.

 

[DavidSchaub]

Say what you want about UMA and on-chip memory, not using M.2 for their storage and just soldering NANDs to the board has effectively zero good justification that I know of. That's the main issue for me as NANDs do have a finite operating lifespan, however long it may be if you're writing 20GB/day (erasing counts as writing).​

Oh, not including M.2 slots is iffy I agree, but the rumoured Mac Pro Pro would have tons of space for dirt cheap M.2 card adapters, so that is kinda moot. If you're buying a $8000 computer, who cares if you have to buy a $40 PCIe card?

I'm sure Apple is building their drives to last the life of the machines, and if you want to use them after 5+ years, you are probably OK with hacking together some solution for out-of-date hardware.

Apple does sell replacement drives for the Mac Pro, so I expect that they will continue to do so.

The justification for Apple is: They can charge more money for storage (though you can always buy 3rd party external storage) and they have more control of the storage sub-system because their flash-controller is part of their SoC.

 

[DavidSchaub]

Wrong, Mac already loses so many 3D and AI software just because of apple silicon and poor performance. You only justifying Mac that is specialized only for few industry. For example, there are quite a lot of people using Mac Pro 2019 for 3D works and half of software they are using dont even support Apple Silicon Mac. And they work for Disney. Limiting hardware and software will kill the pro market again just like Mac Pro 2013 did for several years.

I missed what I said that was "wrong"?

Software support is another matter, and some of that software will get ported over, and some of it won't.

Yeah, Apple is writing off some Pro users. Apple is fine with that. Apple is saying that those users can go elsewhere. Dropping some users is always a gamble, but Apple has done it again and again. Nobody should be surprised by it, or bother complaining about it, these days.

This is just: normal Apple. You might as well be yelling at an Apple shaped cloud in the sky.

 

[sunny5]

Then it was normal to make Mac Pro 2013, a failure. How nice.

 

[DavidSchaub]

Then it was normal to make Mac Pro 2013, a failure. How nice.

Apple is now shipping their third iteration of really small "Pro mini workstation"... which Apple seems fixated on making, for reasons? Maybe the Mac Studio will succeed where the PowerMac G4 Cube and the Mac Pro (2013) failed miserably?

Apple makes weird calls, but it clearly makes them very intentionally.

Time will tell if the Mac Pro ships and if PCIe slots are really the only additional feature that enough Pros want to justify it.

 

[sunny5]

Even Mac Studio isn't great as it doesn't even close to RTX 3090 but RTX 3060 and yet they are not considering to update it just because of basic Mac Pro. If it's true, then Apple has no idea what they are doing for sure. Apple Silicon itself is just bad for Mac Pro that's why they couldn't finish their transition in 2 years. This is another same topic I dealt with over and over again so I dont see any point of keep having a conversation while Apple is failing with Pro uses especially GPU intensive software like 3D.

 

[dmr727]

so I dont see any point of keep having a conversation while Apple is failing with Pro uses especially GPU intensive software like 3D.

Yet you continue to post the same thing over and over again? If you don't see the point, why do you do it? 🤔

 

[Boil]

buying a Mac for gaming is just silly...

Macs are fine for some casual gaming, but if one is really into PC gaming, then an actual Intel/Nvidia PC build is the way to go...

Or go to the middle ground with an XBox Series X...?

Oh, not including M.2 slots is iffy I agree, but the rumoured Mac Pro Pro would have tons of space for dirt cheap M.2 card adapters, so that is kinda moot. If you're buying a $8000 computer, who cares if you have to buy a $40 PCIe card?

OWC M.2 RAID card, $13K will get one a blazingly fast 64TB array...

 

[lepidotós]

Macs are fine for some casual gaming, but if one is really into PC gaming, then an actual Intel/Nvidia PC build is the way to go...

Hear me out: Linux, Proton, and Steam via box86 (and -64 for you pedants). Hundreds of frames per second, 1080p, for hours on end.​

Time will tell if the Mac Pro ships and if PCIe slots are really the only additional feature that enough Pros want to justify it.

I imagine maybe better heat dissipation, a more stout PSU for higher clocks, SATA (or SAS) ports, and various other external ports would be lined up. I also would like to see dual SoCs if socketed RAM is out of the question.​

 

[Unregistered 4U]

In my opinion, Apple has already lost the professional industrial market.
Most of the professional industry uses Windows/Linux based workstations.

Agreed. If a user doesn’t require either Apple Silicon, macOS or an app that requires macOS, AND does NOT require the absolute fastest macOS device currently being produced, then there’s not much of a use case for the Mac Pro beyond a user just “wanting” it.

 

[seek3r]

Great. How were they configured? How often have they been upgraded since they were purchased? In what industry do you work?

FWIW to weigh in while I and most other devops folks and regular devs on my team work on MBPs (with any truly major heavy lifting on our cloud based VMs or machine’s racked in the corp datacenter) our designers do work on desktop macs, and they use 2019s for the most part.

While a few folks are using studios, almost exclusively relatively new employees who needed new hardware purchased in the last couple years as they onboarded, the majority of designers got their 2019 Mac Pros upgraded recently by IT with more RAM and in some cases new graphics cards. I think for designer positions our IT dept is playing wait and see on the new Mac Pros as much as they can and seeing the upgrading in place for now as a maintenance cycle.

 

[seek3r]

Hear me out: Linux, Proton, and Steam via box86 (and -64 for you pedants). Hundreds of frames per second, 1080p, for hours on end.


I imagine maybe better heat dissipation, a more stout PSU for higher clocks, SATA (or SAS) ports, and various other external ports would be lined up. I also would like to see dual SoCs if socketed RAM is out of the question.​

If I had to bet on one thing being dropped in a new Mac Pro it would be SATA/SAS, I think no matter what they’re trying to push folks using a lot of bulk storage locally to thunderbolt enclosures (that said maybe itll stay if they just reuse the 2019 case)

 

[pdoherty]

Macs are fine for some casual gaming, but if one is really into PC gaming, then an actual Intel/Nvidia PC build is the way to go...

Or go to the middle ground with an XBox Series X...?

Second that - Series X is great.

 

[krell100]

I don't get people wanting what is essentially a PC build. If you want a big, expandable, upgradeable box with a monster GPU in it, the market is saturated with those machines. Take your pick. But if you want a Mac then you are clearly in a tiny little niche within a niche and Apple would be nuts to build a big ass PC and put an Apple logo on it. And the thing is you don't have to wait for what you want, monster PCs exist right now, so go buy one and get some work done.

 

[seek3r]

I don't get people wanting what is essentially a PC build. If you want a big, expandable, upgradeable box with a monster GPU in it, the market is saturated with those machines. Take your pick. But if you want a Mac then you are clearly in a tiny little niche within a niche and Apple would be nuts to build a big ass PC and put an Apple logo on it. And the thing is you don't have to wait for what you want, monster PCs exist right now, so go buy one and get some work done.

But people want to run MacOS on their workstations. Hell, some people have workflows that actually use Apple products, like Final Cut. For that matter if you want to build software for MacOS you need a MacOS machine to build it on. The Mac Pro is a very well designed high end workstation, even outside of running MacOS. There are other niche workstations too, and always have been.

Anyone working on a Mac Pro is looking for a high end workstation, not just a pumped up gaming PC. Those arent exactly cheap no matter whose you buy, and there arent actually that many companies that make comparable boxes.

And your argument is even sillier with AS: it’s not crazy to want a super pumped up version of Apple’s ARM chips, they’re already blazingly fast, it’d be great to see what they can do with a machine that’s not thermally constrained in any way and TDP can be *way* higher.