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Mac Pro Reportedly on 'Back Burner' and 'Largely Written Off' at Apple
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I think they want to get rid of Professional market, they just want semi pro or enthusiast market.
Home Studio Recordings instead of Pro Studio Recordings, that's just and example.
Explain how 128 MAX Ram of apple silicon can compete with Intel Mac Pro's 1.5 TB RAM.
Apple can't compete in situation where costumers need more RAM or GPU.
It has been proven outside of benchmarks an x86 system beats the M3 Ultra in nearly all scenarios. The ONLY reason I still use one is due to video editing. But everything else even the older 4080 beats the Mac due.
“An x86 system”
Which x86 system, specifically?
So you arent Apple’s target market… that’s ok, you know
From the kind of things you keep throwing out it sounds like you need the kind of lift that’d you’d get If you shoved a 5080 in a r740xd like I have in my garage with 56 cores (if you could, a 5080 wouldnt work in that machine, but I digress). Apple’s not targeting that market.
Use the right tool for the job, dont complain that the hammer is a bad wrench
Why would they? For the number of units they’d sell that’s an absolutely gigantic investment. The standard chips they have now are perfect for almost all of their customers, so unless they fear pros going elsewhere there’s no reason to spend that much for the 1%
The 2010 Mac Pro and briefly the 2019 Mac Pro WAS part of my target market. That is the problem.
I think the number of units they'd sell would increase if they made a capable Mac Pro. Apple neutered the current Mac Pro thus driving people away.
They also increased the price by $1000 for a less capable box. If it was only $1000 or even $1500 more than the Mac Studio I think more people would buy it even for its current PCI expansion. At $3000 more its a really hard sell.
And I liked xserves, welcome to the real world, where sometimes companies shift priorities and dont make what you want anymore
Also how could you have been the target market for the 7,1 if you wanted nvidia and CUDA? There was never an appropriate supported nvidia GPU or CUDA implementation that would have worked under macos in the 7,1 and been practical for that
Well, I know of many people that use a Mac Pro just for the PCI slots for faster storage then Thunderbolt provides etc. That is what I was going to get, after they upgraded it to M4 or M5. I think Apple is slipping here, if this is even true. Just a rumour.
Apple even kept the Mac Pro around for that very reason. Certain Mac users need PCI-4 and up speeds, built in. Thunderbolt 5 doesn't cut it. That is why the Mac Pro M2 existed in the first place. Customers made it loud and clear and they heard. Their pro market buys a ton of them. It just needs a refresh now.
Apple even kept the Mac Pro around for that very reason. Certain Mac users need PCI-4 and up speeds, built in. Thunderbolt 5 doesn't cut it. That is why the Mac Pro M2 existed in the first place. Customers made it loud and clear and they heard. Their pro market buys a ton of them. It just needs a refresh now.
Obviously.
But the question is whether it would increase enough to justify the investment and complexity. Without the Mac Pro, they can eventually get rid of any code that allows for additional RAM, internal PCIe expansion, etc.
ECC is necessary for everybody and Apple should use it everywhere. You do online banking on your device? You would like to know whether that random reboot last Thursday was due to faulty or slowly failing RAM? You don't want some file in your TM backup to be randomly corrupted?
If the pro market were buying a ton of them I'd wager they would have already refreshed it. The Mac Pro is in a death spiral. Between the more powerful smaller machines making its niche ever smaller, and people having jumped ship in 2013 for lack of internal upgrade options, and then in 2023 for even worse internal upgrade options, and anywhere inbetween because it was often neglected by Apple, there can't be too many customers left. AMD makes some really nice chips for workstations.
Well one thing that Apple could do to make a lot of 2019 Mac Pro users happy is to offer a motherboard swap to Apple Silicon; well not the current M2 one, but something better, if they decide to release something new.
The 2019 Mac Pro case design is fantastic.
Of course if they do EOL the Mac Pro, here is hoping that 20 years later those 2019 Mac Pros are worth a **** load of money for the nostalgic collectors...lol.
The 2019 Mac Pro case design is fantastic.
Of course if they do EOL the Mac Pro, here is hoping that 20 years later those 2019 Mac Pros are worth a **** load of money for the nostalgic collectors...lol.
Just addressing the circular logic used to justify the demise of the Mac Pro.
It's not circular logic to look at a market segment and see that desktop sales in general are way down. That's nothing Apple-specific, and there's no reason to believe it would reverse.
It is when the system in question has been castrated to the point where those who would have bought it no longer consider it a value. Especially when said system is almost the equivalent of a lower priced system. When that's done is it any surprise sales have fallen off a cliff?
We are in the era of disposable 'computing' units and the idea you could buy a machine from Apple that you could expand and personally configure to your needs over time has gone. If that is what you need, then the Windows/Linux/Unix environment is your only choice.
These fast integrated boxes from Apple which you sell or throw away after you have exceeded their capabilities is fine for semi pro/amateur use, but for professional use they are completely useless. The investment in the setup and configuration of a new box is enough to dissuade me from using them for a professional/production environment. After all, MacOS is hardly the most friendly environment in which to work for configuration and adapting to specialist requirements and interfaces to new equipment. Having TB 5 interfaces only helps so much and you spend a ton of money on TB 5 controllers for your devices which are not needed for a system that has plug in components which you select for your use.
There is a philosophy here at work and you either subscribe to it or you do not. Apple want you to buy closed box computing units, the Windows/Linux world allows you design your own computing units adapted to/growing with your needs. Make your choice. I used to write my own customized OS and applications for control systems and I know that Apple does not make anything suitable for that market and you should not expect them to do so. They are a consumer/semi pro technology provider and that is fine. They are good at it. Horse for courses, I think the expression goes.
These fast integrated boxes from Apple which you sell or throw away after you have exceeded their capabilities is fine for semi pro/amateur use, but for professional use they are completely useless. The investment in the setup and configuration of a new box is enough to dissuade me from using them for a professional/production environment. After all, MacOS is hardly the most friendly environment in which to work for configuration and adapting to specialist requirements and interfaces to new equipment. Having TB 5 interfaces only helps so much and you spend a ton of money on TB 5 controllers for your devices which are not needed for a system that has plug in components which you select for your use.
There is a philosophy here at work and you either subscribe to it or you do not. Apple want you to buy closed box computing units, the Windows/Linux world allows you design your own computing units adapted to/growing with your needs. Make your choice. I used to write my own customized OS and applications for control systems and I know that Apple does not make anything suitable for that market and you should not expect them to do so. They are a consumer/semi pro technology provider and that is fine. They are good at it. Horse for courses, I think the expression goes.
Again, that's one factor. Another factor is that fewer and fewer people buy desktop towers.
And fewer and fewer people by desktop towers because Apple has neutered their desktop tower. Thus the circular argument.
EDIT: I would buy a Mac Pro but I see no point because it offers little over a Studio (which I do own). If the Mac Pro retained the ability to expand RAM and use different graphics cards I would buy one. But paying $3K more for what is almost a Mac Studio doesn't make sense, the value is not there.
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At this point there arent many cards used on macs that really use 8 or 16 lanes of PCIe 4. There are definitely some but they’re getting increasingly niche, things like very high speed networking, like 100Gbps for example (but even for people using high end workstations that amount of network bandwidth is exceedingly rare) some very high end video and audio processing gear (but again, most of that end can live on 4 lanes no problem), etc.
The bigger reason than bandwidth in my experience that people use a MP is chassis space, if you’re using 5 or 6 cards you either need a mac studio ultra that looks like it became an octopus or you need a mac pro, and it’s easier to move or rack a single mac pro than than studio.
But again, the people that need that are rather niche.
My suspicion with the long refresh time on the mac pro is that apple not only knows that the use at this point is super niche but also that anyone cramming a mac pro full of cards is also likely on a 5 or so year refresh cycle, the mac pro only needs an update every few years to accommodate its limited userbase
We know from the very recent past that there are special Apple customers who need the PCI expansion built in and we know that certain segments purchase Mac Pros in volume that keeps it going, that is why Apple made the M2 version and introduced it the way they did. They wanted the majority going to Mac Studio while fast PCI needs go to Mac Pro, which Thunderbolt 5 can't even get close to. That was basically the whole premise.
The extreme chip hasn't happened yet which the Mac Pro was made for but an all new M5 Ultra could change all that.
The M3 Ultra is not the clear winner and top dog like the M2 Ultra was and the Max is more powerful for some tasks. So if they put in the M3 Ultra only, it wouldn't be great and wouldn't sell as many as the M2 did. Unlike the M2, no one is in love with the M3 Ultra since it has trade offs. I think this is why they are waiting for the M5 Ultra, which would be in lock step with being top dog and can do it all faster in every way. That is what it looks like to me, since the M4 Ultra is clearly not happening now. The M5 seems to be the chip that everyone thought the M4 was going to be.
Expanding ram and being able to dump a few m.2 or full size pcie cards in there for additional storage would be awesome.
One side of this nobody seems to appreciate is, say I buy a machine with 64gb ram today. It meets my needs now. I pick up a new contract and suddenly need something with 128 or 256gb ram.
With a tower, I could buy the additional ram, install it in my computer tomorrow, and be done with it.
With a Mac Studio, I'm going to be buying a new Mac Studio. And then transferring my data over. And then figuring out what to do with the old one.
If it were a tower, I could even swap the SSDs between towers.
Don't even get me started on the ****ery where you have to use DFU to initialize new nand storage to work with these stupid apple silicon machines. They're engineered in a very sloppy way.
One thing I find really frustrating, is the mac studio is not small by modern standards. They could add a tiny bit to the size if they needed to, and then we could have multiple SSD slots and upgrdeable ram, if they wanted to bother with it.
"Well then, buy something else." I actually did, and I still have a mac studio anyway LOL. My other machine runs linux, and linux is great for development and docker and servers, and lately... gaming! But there aren't very many great photography/music/video editing tools on there. They DO exist, they just aren't great........
... It'd be nice to have one machine that did a great job at everything instead of 2 that do great jobs at some things but not others lol.
It is a bit of a 'workaround' (not as stylish) but Apple could just do the a Rack Version. And then someone (maybe Apple) can sell a stand to make it vertical for those who wanted it deskside. Skip the $800 wheels thing. The 'sylish desktop' crown just hand to the Mac Studio. [ There were always a set of non-fans of the MP 2019 sytle where have remove every cable from all of the cards to get the case open. Some folks bought rack version to tip-on-side, just to avoid that. ]
The Mac Pro isn't a literally "desktop" system, which leads to some disconnects Apple has with it. There are folks to slap it on top of their desk ( in some cases 'to be seen').
Doing two cases for a single product is likely also a big drag on the product because there is almost two trips through the case design process.
The hard part there is that they somewhat need to synch the vast majority of the remaining user base to their upgrade cycle ( given their roadmap policies).
they need some kind of card that can help folks get closer to lining up to their cycle , or otherwise somewhat get into a death spiral. They prune out folks who don't match up. Leads to smaller users base. So do longer cycle .... rinse and repeat.
A Cluster inside the box could be one of. those 5-6 cards. If Apple punts 100% of boosting the value of those 5-6 cards off into the 3rd party space, then there is a huge problem. There are gaps that 3rd parties just cannot fill. Apple doesn't have to do exactly what AMD/NVidia do in the legacy dGPU card space , but doing nothing is too little also to add value. (empty slots won't maggically fill themselves with zero Apple effort).