The MacStudio is a Mac mini on steroids. The Mac Pro is not.
Mac Studio has a zero upgrade path where the Pro can expand and expand.
Mac Studio has a zero upgrade path where the Pro can expand and expand.
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Mac Pro Now Starts With 512GB of Storage and Radeon Pro W5500X Graphics
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True, but there is one snag with the services:
Only if you're using Apple hardware will you actually use those services.
There are edge cases but the next Pro will surely get closer to 30-50K multicore compute score compared to this one at around 20K, right? If you can wait, I'd wait. The current Mac Pro is a great machine but the next one is going to blow its pants off.
I am very curious about how a Mac Pro powered by Apple silicon can be upgraded manually.
Exactly. Some people just don't seem to understand that. The Mac Pro can continue to be upgraded to fit workload needs and we've already seen massive upgrades with the GPUs since it came out in 2019. The Mac Pro has a higher base starting price than the Mac Studio, but the long term cost is much less. To upgrade the Mac Studio you have to buy another Mac Studio. So let's say you bought a base Mac Pro for $6k. A couple years later you want to upgrade the GPU which costs $2k. Compare that with a Mac Studio with M1 Ultra for $6k. A couple years later to upgrade the GPU you'd have to buy another $6K Mac Studio. That's $8k vs $12k. And odds are that the Mac Pro can handle your workload just as well as the Studio. The performance specs look great on paper, but in actual use there will be little difference.
That’s a fair question. Definitely some measure of what would normally be upgradable is going to be baked into that system on a chip. I suppose we could see eGPU support (along with Thunderbolt’s support for PCIe signaling), possibly some sort of RAM module on a bus (though that would, of course, operate outside of the Unified Memory architecture and would be slower). It likely would offer internal PCIe slots in some capacity, since Apple Silicon clearly supports PCIe over Thunderbolt. Top it off with perhaps some sort of specialty Apple Silicon expansion slot (that could be used internally or externally via Thunderbolt), maybe offer internal-ish storage upgrades (that would be slower than the internal storage on the SoC but might still be faster than external USB 4 or Thunderbolt 4), and that would likely be sufficient expandability for most pro users.
So YouTubers who didn't need the machine in the 1st place could get clicks and for normal Mac fans that have no self control, like everyone over @ RelayFM
How many people actually need more power than this Studio has? Like 1 out of 1,000,000 users?
Why are we assuming an AS Mac Pro will be upgradeable? More powerful sure, but upgradeable? It's all a system on a chip with RAM and everything on one piece.
Let me ask Mac Pro users this---would you want to give up the unified memory architecture in the AS machines?
Basically, if you want unified memory (and I think professionals would for video memory), you're going to have to be prepared for a machine that is either not possible to upgrade or a machine with minimal upgrades.
But you get none of the AS benefits with an Intel Mac Pro. That means a degraded software experience in macOS, that means slower memory and an uncertain software upgrade path, as AS is clearly the future.
AS' performance is tremendous, but if you want to take a ride on the ARM spaceplane, I think people will have to be prepared to make some sacrifices with how they expect the machines to work.
It has been like that as long as I can remember and I bought my first Mac in 1995
The biggest reason why I imagine the Apple Silicon Mac Pro will be upgradable to some degree is mostly because Apple can’t add hardware for every pro-user workflow, some do require extra internal or external hardware (additional GPUs to speed up 3D rendering at 8k, for instance). But the second reason is that the Mac Studio exists. On the pro-low end, what can an Apple Silicon Mac Pro offer that the Mac Studio doesn’t other than some degree of internal expansion? On the high end, sure, it can offer an even higher performance chip (current entry model starts at the same price as a specced up Mac Studio), but, on the low end (say, the $2500 or $3000 range), can it offer anything? A super pro Mac Studio likely will be a poor fit for the sort of uses that max out an Intel Mac Pro’s RAM capacity, given the limitations on memory capacity of the current Apple Silicon line up. If the Mac Pro is just 2 M1 Ultras in something the size of the trash can Mac Pro, that’s just not going to cut it for most of the people buying Mac Pros, especially from a RAM perspective.
Serious Answer:
It can still do bootcamp. - I have done a lot of VR work ( in the past year ) and currently mac Support is zip all… but the Duo GPU cards are stupidly fast in windows too. It’s still a VERY fast windows machine too.
The Ultra GPU is faster than the Fastest single Mac Pro Gpu but not the Duo Cards or 2 X duo cards which are a lot faster ( albeit a lot of cash ) - the GPUs are workstation cards and generally That means they are geared up for Billions of Polys but less textures. And gaming cards are all about the textures - It will be interesting to see what the M1 Ultra is like with that…
8 PCIE Slots - Very much needed for Video And Audio breakout cards, Additional Storage, RAID Card. Scientifc and engineering cards.
1.5TB Ram and up to 128gb GPU DDR5 Ram - nothing unified. 3D apps eat this stuff up.
I suspect that will be addressed in the next Pro but the will continue support for this for 7+ years.
That said I will start to think about selling mine sooner rather than later now.
Yeahhhhhh... "LOL". I couldn't have said better.
How can such a high end, high cost computer come with such little storage?
PCIE and expansion is the key. I could also see having built in unified memory and a secondary ram for certain tasks being a possibility.
Yeah, it didn’t make sense to me how they said M1 Ultra was the last chip. Unless they figured out a way to use more than one chip lol.
The killer here with the Mac Pro is the expandability. Apple / Mac has enjoyed the freedom that playing in the x86/64 arena for some time and a side effect of that was basically any windows peripheral would work with a Mac on a basic level. the software may not have been there but the implementation was not the same kind of barrier as apple silicon. Enter the M1 and its variants. the M1 is extremely powerful but so far after over a year of it being the star of the Apple ecosystem we still haven't seen it do some tricks that are really basic in a PC.
1) haven't seen a single PCI-E card (a real one). yes there are some thunderbolt to PCI-E things that may function out there but I mean a native PCI-E card working over a standard PCI-E slot.
2) any video processing outside of the M1 GPU core. (this may never happen since the GPU is pretty robust)
3) Mac Pro users are used to being able to expand memory / disks / ETC and swap components. everything so far on the M1 front is a single soldiered board. no expansion. no upgradability. this is unlikely to be "OK" with a Mac Pro.
the release of the Mac Pro will likely bring the first of a new generation of PCI-E / thunderbolt 4 devices that are for an M1. sad thing is I only want 1 thing... just 1 thing... a way to run DX12 on an M1 system. dont care if it is native, parallels, crossover, or requires an extra GPU. right now I have to have a windows PC just for DX12 and quite frankly it is sad when I know the Mac can do the job, it just doesn't know how.
1) haven't seen a single PCI-E card (a real one). yes there are some thunderbolt to PCI-E things that may function out there but I mean a native PCI-E card working over a standard PCI-E slot.
2) any video processing outside of the M1 GPU core. (this may never happen since the GPU is pretty robust)
3) Mac Pro users are used to being able to expand memory / disks / ETC and swap components. everything so far on the M1 front is a single soldiered board. no expansion. no upgradability. this is unlikely to be "OK" with a Mac Pro.
the release of the Mac Pro will likely bring the first of a new generation of PCI-E / thunderbolt 4 devices that are for an M1. sad thing is I only want 1 thing... just 1 thing... a way to run DX12 on an M1 system. dont care if it is native, parallels, crossover, or requires an extra GPU. right now I have to have a windows PC just for DX12 and quite frankly it is sad when I know the Mac can do the job, it just doesn't know how.
Plenty of reasons - Full speed PCIe slots and expandability. External PCIe expanders are limited to 4x. I run two expanders on my Intel MacBook Pro for a Radeon Pro 6600 and a SAS Expander card to run an LTO drive. I also have 10Gbe connected via Thunderbolt for a proper NAS. You can't upgrade RAM, CPU or Storage on the new Mac Studio.
I'd probably still purchase the Intel Mac Pro tower over the Mac Studio due to my needs however the price of both is prohibitive. I was disappointed by the price of the new machine. AMD released new Threadripper CPUs yesterday and Intel is due to release new CPUs in a couple of months. Apple is barely ahead of the wave at the moment. Comparing a last gen 5700x is pointless in 2022 when Radeon 7000 series chips will also be out in a few months. Performance of the Mac Studio looks good but I've never bought a computer I haven't needed to add PCIe cards to.
The Mac Studio is really for people who want a beefy Mac mini, not a Mac Pro. Apple needs to stop dicking around and support Vulkan properly and release a computer that is properly expandable. Apple will never support DX12 which is a Windows technology.
I will probably move to linux and back to x86 if the new Mac Pro isn't reasonably priced and expandable. The Intel/AMD CPU war is producing better results for less money. Apple seems to be pushing itself into a corner where it doesn't support discrete GPUs and expandability. A really good AMD or Intel CPU is $500 whereas for Apple you are looking at about $1500 to add the extra CPU in the Mac Studio. By that equation the Apple CPU is 3 times the price of a similar offering by AMD/Intel.
Apple are trying to compete with AMD, Nvidia, Intel and even Samsung now for graphics performance, compute performance, storage speeds and capacity. The result is very expensive computers because Apple has to spend a lot on R&D to keep up with the other 4 players while trying to maintain it's very high profit margin. When at the end of the day the Apple PC market is smaller than x86 is. I'm not even clear why they have decided to do this? Do they expect to grow market share with this Mac Studio product?
Apple are possibly alienating people who want access to proper games, x86 software, AMD/Nvidia graphics acceleration, expandability and upgradeability. FCP is now outdated and really isn't being actively developed so even video editors may be looking elsewhere.
Besides those who want a "basic" laptop PC for office work I would argue that the majority of computer purchasers are better served looking elsewhere at the moment. The Mac Studio hasn't really done anything to change that.
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That is exactly the point of this product. Our Post Production house has 7 of these machines in use 24/7 as both production editing machines and overnight rendering machines. We use Adobe apps, which run on Apple Silicon, but have a vast ecosystem of third party plugins that do not have a predictable timeline or path toward ASi native builds. This product is available and shipping right now as opposed to a promise of something coming in the future. This product is extremely important to me, my employees, and our business. So it’s a bit myopic to say it’s pointless.
Not to mention the expandability as others have already discussed. We have nearly 1TB of RAM in each of these towers and have the flexibility to upgrade our GPUs as new modules and architectures become available. There’s a reason Apple found this product important enough to resurrect, but it is pretty obvious it’s not designed to be a mass market product.
This combined with the fact that there are people who do work on BOTH windows and macOS. The mac pro will run windows natively and work with Nvidia gpus.
For example, I have a mac pro with a 3090 rtx that runs machine learning algorithms using its cuda cores.
Microsoft won't even work on Mac studio unless you run virtual, and thats not running natively.
Additionally, I have 192gb ram in my mac pro, you can only go to 128gb in mac studio.
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