I imagine the question was more: what do they do where the MP adds something the other Macs don’t offer.
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Mac Pro Reportedly on 'Back Burner' and 'Largely Written Off' at Apple
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I imagine the question was more: what do they do where the MP adds something the other Macs don’t offer.
Yeah, it's really a shame they decided to make the Mac Pro so absurdly expensive. They could still have made a beautiful machine without making absolutely every detail so insanely over-designed and basically "luxurious", in the sense of it being a kind of Mercedes E Class tower. It just wasn't necessary, and it shovelled cost into features that really just didn't matter to customers. It's beautiful and impressive as a machine, but outrageously impractical, for the most part. A customizable tower in a Mac design language is entirely possible without breaking the bank. Such a waste.
There are still pro audio post production workflows using Pro Tools HDX PCIe cards. Some features of the software are *still* HDX only, like PEC/DIR monitoring.. Avid still sells the cards and they are still used widely.
Using them in Thunderbolt enclosures is common, but the best performances is still in Mac Pro slots.
I’m loathe to move from a Pro to a Studio because as someone who works on sound all day, I love that the Pro makes zero sound - the fan design is amazing.
I’ve heard Studios at full tilt and they are not quiet enough for my taste.
I’ve heard Studios at full tilt and they are not quiet enough for my taste.
Apple are more into disposable computing, you buy a computer with a certain spec, that's what you get for life. There is no ability to add ram or change a processor with the MP, so you may as well get a MS. Also they don't do desktop/laptop variations of their processors, so its not like you can get tons more out of a processor that is identical to the others across their lineup.
I had a 2009 MP, it was good, but even then the DVD player sounded like a Cessna trying to take off in my office.
I had a 2009 MP, it was good, but even then the DVD player sounded like a Cessna trying to take off in my office.
i mean throttling on max chips is a thing. I remember there being tests between 14in and 16in M3 Max macbooks and latter was scoring higher in benchmarks due to 14in thermal throttling during longer tests.
I know mine is always warm even when not doing intensive work. Never tried gaming seriously on it but it for sure screamed when compiling a giant codebase. I am sure a Studio would fare much better due to a bigger fan and heatsink.
Do you remember when some guy on YouTube put an i9 MBP in a freezer when rendering to see how it would perrform? Oh, the memories...
I hope Geekbench 7 gives us some kind of "thermal drop-off" number after a ten-minute test.
For short tests, the difference is around 0.1% on the M3 Max. It's more interesting if you take the M4 Max on the MBP vs. on the Mac Studio; there, we get a whole 3.6%/2.0% ST/MT more, despite the clock purportedly being the same. So it seems to almost immediately throttle a little
Would love to know how your hub works, I have such a mix of HDD's, SSD's & NVMe in my Mac Pro's, I'm just not looking forward to the jungle of external boxes & cables needed to accommodate them all by switching to the Studio--along with having to replace my two Digi 003 racks since firewire is no more!
I admit that I sugarcoated my description a little: We dont have one hub that has all the peripherals built in. There are Thunderbolt hubs, HDMI splitters, USB Extenders/Extensions and small Ethernet switches. We have a 19" rack, we hide all the cables in it, and we do decent cable management.
In a way, they've come full circle to the 1984 Mac concept of a self-contained, sealed appliance-like computer with no user-serviceable parts and no expansion slots. I worked in VFX in the late 1980s we built PC's from scratch for motion-control, etc., but messing around with those early Macs was always more problematic. I remember being fascinated seeing all the engraved names on the inside of the case the first time I took one apart.
I might even agree to abandon the Mac Pro tower, even though they are the only Macs I've used for over two decades and I think they are fantastic, regardless of the price, but only if Apple puts slots for normal NVMe storage in the Mac Studio. That would finally end the discrimination against Mac users on this issue and we could buy storage at normal market prices.
This now has no justification and shows only greed, there is no technical justification for such an approach, ultimately it shows disrespect and patronizing of one's own customers.
This now has no justification and shows only greed, there is no technical justification for such an approach, ultimately it shows disrespect and patronizing of one's own customers.
To all the people posting here who’ve never used a Mac Pro and think the Studio is the answer to everything: You have no clue what you’re talking about. I just transitioned to a Studio from a Mac Pro for reasons beyond my control and it’s been one headache after another. Yes, the processor is faster, but everything else ISN’T. The internal PCI bus on my Intel Mac Pro can still completely smoke any TB5 peripheral for I/O speed. It’s not even close. One of the oldest bait-and-switches in consumer electronics is computer manufacturers telling you what the maximum possible bandwidth is for any connection knowing full well that you will NEVER EVER experience that speed in real life.
I have the best TB5 peripherals you can buy for this new Studio rig and they underperform in every way compared to the Mac Pro. So, all said and done, I now have a bunch of extra boxes, cables and connections that I didn’t have before, they aren’t as fast, there aren’t enough ports on the Studio to match the setup I had, and I’m using more power than I did with the Mac Pro. As a final insult to injury, I actually spent MORE money to get the Studio up to spec for my work than I would have had to spend on a new Mac Pro.
I really don’t care about the economics and sales BS that supposedly justify setting aside the Mac Pro. What I care about is access to a machine that does what I need it to do without having to buy a bunch of extra stuff and watch it underperform against a six-year-old computer.
I’d pay double for an M3 Ultra Mac Pro if I had to. It makes that much of a difference in my day-to-day workflow. There may not be very many people out there who need a machine like the Pro, but I do. And I know a lot of other people who do, too. All Apple would have to do is update the chip and the ports in the MP simultaneously with the Studio and problem solved. And please spare the speech about the resources and time needed to do this. A three-trillion dollar market cap company doesn’t have resource problems. They could build the MP out of solid platinum and still be making money hand over fist.
Please know that before you attempt to trash on this post that everything I bought was thoroughly tested against my Intel Mac Pro and the peripheral products were tested against each other and with multiple connection scenarios. There’s nothing about this comparison or Mac hardware in general that you can tell me that I don’t already know.
If the Studio was supposed to be an upgrade, it sure doesn’t feel like one.
I have the best TB5 peripherals you can buy for this new Studio rig and they underperform in every way compared to the Mac Pro. So, all said and done, I now have a bunch of extra boxes, cables and connections that I didn’t have before, they aren’t as fast, there aren’t enough ports on the Studio to match the setup I had, and I’m using more power than I did with the Mac Pro. As a final insult to injury, I actually spent MORE money to get the Studio up to spec for my work than I would have had to spend on a new Mac Pro.
I really don’t care about the economics and sales BS that supposedly justify setting aside the Mac Pro. What I care about is access to a machine that does what I need it to do without having to buy a bunch of extra stuff and watch it underperform against a six-year-old computer.
I’d pay double for an M3 Ultra Mac Pro if I had to. It makes that much of a difference in my day-to-day workflow. There may not be very many people out there who need a machine like the Pro, but I do. And I know a lot of other people who do, too. All Apple would have to do is update the chip and the ports in the MP simultaneously with the Studio and problem solved. And please spare the speech about the resources and time needed to do this. A three-trillion dollar market cap company doesn’t have resource problems. They could build the MP out of solid platinum and still be making money hand over fist.
Please know that before you attempt to trash on this post that everything I bought was thoroughly tested against my Intel Mac Pro and the peripheral products were tested against each other and with multiple connection scenarios. There’s nothing about this comparison or Mac hardware in general that you can tell me that I don’t already know.
If the Studio was supposed to be an upgrade, it sure doesn’t feel like one.
Nobody is denying that. It has PCIe 3.0 at x16, whereas Thunderbolt 5 is, at most, PCIe 4.0 at x4. That's 15.754 GB/s vs. half that, even in terms of gross values.
Plus, each TB controller has shared bandwidth, so if you have a lot of devices connected, that further reduces available bandwidth.
And that's totally fair.
The problem is that the current "cheap" Mac Pro is not selling well because outside the mac world, any computer at Mac Pros pricing, smokes it, so only a few are still buying mac pros at current pricing, so for example they release a mac pro M5 at double the price of Mac Pro M2, just a tiny of a tiny part of mac users will buy it.
I agree -- the form factor already exists, just upgrade the darn thing and call it a day! I'd love to buy one, but it's getting left in the dust with the CPU upgrades on their other computers.
Moving to the latest Apple CPU wouldn’t change what enb141 said, cheap PCs would still utterly destroy it as M chips simply don’t have the bandwidth to interface with anything so expansion is effectively zero. The chip against an Intel chip might win, but if PCI is used Apple loses every time.
All of this , so sad.☹️ I had to move back to PowerMac G5 & dual Cinema from my Mac Pro.... (especially for the audio). I do live in Steve J. Era world... but that's just me. And now I'm searching for a few stuff to upgrade my Abandoned iMac 10.1.... what a way of living.... (* I don't even care to move forward to Mseries... the newer the OSX the less stuff I have access to - programs - & there is no point in virtualize-ing anything , I rather have it native. ) Also I have a Dell Precision W workstation... it seems even dell cut there most beloved line, "the Precision".... the future is bright.... "Load the flux Capacitor... we are going back.... - back where? Back To The Future.... 1985... Floor IT utill you hit 88Mph! "{Engage!} .
Nostalgia is a beautiful thing, but living in the past forever is not possible. If you want to use Macs nowadays, you should look for something more modern.All of this , so sad.☹️ I had to move back to PowerMac G5 & dual Cinema from my Mac Pro.... (especially for the audio). I do live in Steve J. Era world... but that's just me. And now I'm searching for a few stuff to upgrade my Abandoned iMac 10.1.... what a way of living.... (* I don't even care to move forward to Mseries... the newer the OSX the less stuff I have access to - programs - & there is no point in virtualize-ing anything , I rather have it native. ) Also I have a Dell Precision W workstation... it seems even dell cut there most beloved line, "the Precision".... the future is bright.... "Load the flux Capacitor... we are going back.... - back where? Back To The Future.... 1985... Floor IT utill you hit 88Mph! "{Engage!} .
All of this , so sad.☹️ I had to move back to PowerMac G5 & dual Cinema from my Mac Pro.... (especially for the audio). I do live in Steve J. Era world... but that's just me. And now I'm searching for a few stuff to upgrade my Abandoned iMac 10.1.... what a way of living.... (* I don't even care to move forward to Mseries... the newer the OSX the less stuff I have access to - programs - & there is no point in virtualize-ing anything , I rather have it native. ) Also I have a Dell Precision W workstation... it seems even dell cut there most beloved line, "the Precision".... the future is bright.... "Load the flux Capacitor... we are going back.... - back where? Back To The Future.... 1985... Floor IT utill you hit 88Mph! "{Engage!} .
Instead of looking at "how many PCIe slots does this have", ask: what is it you're actually trying to accomplish? Odds are M-series SoCs will do quite well at it.
Hey, if money is an issue then yes, an older pro Mac can do a lot, if you already have the software, hardware and setup and you don't need more power or speed. For pro audio the Mac Pro 2019 is currently king. Check out Neil Parfitt's channel and the many comments under his videos for more: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCj63K66wb7BEXDNzOhDpTJAAll of this , so sad.☹️ I had to move back to PowerMac G5 & dual Cinema from my Mac Pro.... (especially for the audio). I do live in Steve J. Era world... but that's just me. And now I'm searching for a few stuff to upgrade my Abandoned iMac 10.1.... what a way of living.... (* I don't even care to move forward to Mseries... the newer the OSX the less stuff I have access to - programs - & there is no point in virtualize-ing anything , I rather have it native. ) Also I have a Dell Precision W workstation... it seems even dell cut there most beloved line, "the Precision".... the future is bright.... "Load the flux Capacitor... we are going back.... - back where? Back To The Future.... 1985... Floor IT utill you hit 88Mph! "{Engage!} .
PCI-slots are needed in this field and having it in one box is a huge plus as well.
I disagree, Audio Quality is better on the G5 ,people probably misunderstood me, I have Analog Pioneer AMP +4x90W sound system over classic audio jack. I watch mostly movies and play music on the Mac(I did editing&web dev. over 1.8 decades back but no one asked this recently). I Saved my G5 and moved back to it because it's easyer for me to do things there, I have issues obtaining and adjusting to badly written software for my (sierra) MacPro (4,1). Not necesarly nostalgia , it's more like familiar neurons & sinapses already formed back before 2009.
"Simpler Times ,produce greater successes".
I did mention I have also a few dell's , they are all pointless... (in the sense that I can do most of my work with a 2003-2005 machine.)
"Simpler Times ,produce greater successes".
I don't fully understand why they didn't fit it with the Studio innards but have a few more modular parts for clear upgrade paths, possibly greater cooling(?). Is there just no market for it anymore?