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Mac Pro Reportedly on 'Back Burner' and 'Largely Written Off' at Apple
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I thought they were still working on their own chip for that? If they do succeed there, then the Mac Pro chassis isn't probably the ideal configuration. If Apple manages to break into the AI market, I'd expect a new form factor or the revival of the Xserve.
There are a lot of uses for PCIe slots for video professionals and live productions. SDI input and output cards can be genlocked for locked output, which is not possible using standard HDMI/DisplayPort outs; which is a real bummer when someone is driving massive LED walls.
With that said, my personal belief is that the 2019 was really the last real Mac Pro, even though it gets clobbered by Apple Silicon. The 2019 model just had way more PCIe bandwidth available.
Thunderbolt 5 is helping on this front, since it has enough bandwidth to do 4x 4K outputs @ 60hz.
Some of the newer screen management systems are promising single inputs using HDMI 2.1 and DP 2.0 at 7680+ x 2160, which will help a lot on the LED front. Although Apple needs to lift the limit on what it will allow on maximum horizontal resolution.
Now dual Thunderbolt 5 > PCIe chassis would be interesting.
I hear you, but at the same time how much more trouble would it be to put that expansion box… inside a box with the CPU?
It’s amazing that the company with a top five (?) market cap in the world can’t pull off one prestige loss-leader to secure high-end users and to just look cool — innovate, my buttocks or something similar.
I mean how much is it worth simply to avoid bad press like this?
Yes.
I flew through the entire Intel era with just the 4.1 because it was so upgradeable.
I frankly kind of admire it. He has other machines around but I totally understand the love of the Power Macintosh legacy and it hurts me a little as well to see it go away.
And it’s their own fault. If they at least updated the chip then the argument would take a different angle.
I hear a MacBook Noob with A-chips is on its way.
Any external expansion is "bottlenecked" by Thunderbolt which, apart from only offering 4 lanes per port, is usually running a version or two behind on PCIe. I believe TB4 is currently only PCIe3 and TB5 is on PCIe4 while PCIe5 is the current norm and the first PCIe6 products were launched this year...
As I understand it, the Mac Pro gets most of its PCIe 4 lanes from the otherwise-unused SSD interface on the second M2 Max die, so its PCIe slots are faster than anything you could get via Thunderbolt 4.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the M5 is the first AS chip to use PCIe5 SSDs, so the next step up for the Mac Pro in terms of PCIe speed would be the may-or-may-not-happen M5 Ultra. An M3 Ultra Mac Pro would have other advantages, but no improvement in PCIe bandwidth. Given that PCIe bandwidth is the #1 reason to get a Mac Pro rather than a Studio there probably won't be a compelling reason to upgrade the Pro until/unless a M5 Ultra appears.
That assumes that Apple are going to stick with the idea of "Ultra" being two "Max" dies fused together, doubling everything up, with the consequence of a spare PCIe SSD interface. They've already moved away from the idea of the Max and Pro being basically the same die design, and the 4-die 'extreme' idea seems to have died a death. It may be that future Ultra chips will be dedicated designs with more CPU/GPU cores and neural engines, or more like NVIDIA Grace/Hopper chips, with the second die being dedicated to GPU/AI... That would kill the current Mac Pro concept stone dead.
You’re absolutely right. The problem for the Mac Pro is that it doesn’t really meet the needs of most companies. If, say, a movie studio needs some powerhouse rendering capability they’re better off investing in servers than an individual Mac Pro. The same goes for most corporate needs. As you’re discovering a Mac is essentially an individual workstation. It’s easier (and in some ways cheaper) today to push compute resources onto a dedicated server or to the cloud rather than buying an expensive machine that isn’t as capable as something like AWS.
A someone else mentioned, SDI connections is the only one I know of (but guessing there might be others). Our church uses SDI for all video routing and we have a couple machines that need to inject signal into that network (eg. Pro Presenter output for slides, lyrics, video, confidence monitors, etc).
HDMI has short run lengths and SDI provides a nice stable backbone delivering signal to/from TVs, projectors, cameras, confidence monitors, computers, and more that can be hundreds of feet apart. We have a 40 In x 40 Out SDI router at the core of the SDI network.
Our current 2019 Mac Pro is still going strong but it's replacement is very likely to be a Studio with either a PCIe Expansion box (these SDI connections aren't super high bandwidth so Thunderbolt 4/5 will be plenty) or (if we can find them) Thunderbolt to SDI adapters. Reliability will be the key here, having internal PCIe cards has "just worked" and has been a workhorse for the last 14 years (had a 2012 classic Mac Pro prior to the 2019). From a power perspective the Studio is a totally competent replacement to the 2019 Mac Pro, my concern is just the "consumer-ization" of it. Want to make sure what we go to next will provide another 5-7 years of rock-steady service.
Or they switched to higher spec PC with modular RAM and GPU(s) going back to when the trashcan arrived.
I think a lot (if not majority) of Pro users were in digital media and movie studios doing heavy special effects and animation (Pixar). A Mac Studio is now good enough for the majority of digital media and the film industry are in a shift right now to proprietary systems (Disney has gone Linux with Presto software at Pixar). The Pro may actually be dead already and not know it.
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I'm pleased that these days even the Mac mini supports Thunderbolt 5, HDMI 2.1, and DisplayPort 2.1, and it's easy to buy a 6K monitor that supports all of the above too.
In this environment, it seems the Mac Pro seems even less desirable now.
I was thinking Thunderbolt 5 --> PCIe 4x4 with 3 slots, for say US$2000, perhaps with optional rackmount support. But like I said, I don't expect it.
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It does, that's the sad and frustrating part.
You can go and buy storage nands (specifically for the studio) on ali express and upgrade your Studio. Its not sanctioned by apple but you can do that.
This. I doubt that Apple is selling many Mac Pros at all now.
The Mac Studio is powerful enough for local content creation. Very powerful.
And as the commentator above says, with so much cloud compute - and most AI networks running on the cloud - you can just farm off your work off there.
As mentioned earlier, I work in the ProAudio field. One usecase is live mixing when massive amounts of inputs /outputs with minimal I/O latency is needed. (Live Performances of classical orchestras and choirs for example).
A ProTools HDX system with 3 PCIe cards can do up to 192 physical inputs/outputs with 0.7 msec latency. Which is not achievable with any other Audio Interfaces.
DSP Audio System for Music and Post - Pro Tools | HDX
Experience the pinnacle of audio production with Avid Pro Tools HDX. Achieve studio-quality sound and unparalleled performance in your projects.
It is certainly not necessary to have those PCIe cards inside the main computer, but for the sake of portability and reliabilty (and piece of mind) it might be better to have everything inside one sturdy rackmounted MacPro.
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