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Even having Apples special modules for the Main drive is fine. But not having additional M.2 slots is the real problem. I should be able to drop in an aftermarket 4TB drive as an extra drive without replacing the main OS drive storage.

1000% yes!
This would allow them to still do all their safety security stuff on the main OS drive, untouched by the user, also.
 
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Honest question - this defined usage, is the Mac Pro the best cost effective tool do achieve this?

Wouldn't a threadripper  9980X (64‑core) wouldn't be more cost effective and it has PCIe 5.0
Depends on what you are doing. A lot of the defacto affordable "normal or standard" computer based playback systems are Mac only; although high dollar then you are looking at PC based.

High dollar broadcast systems are going to use broadcast players; which are awesome, but not generally seen in most corporate or touring situations.
 
Doing Ultra on the watch makes sense since the Watch is not for Pros. iPhone Pro doesn’t make sense. Its a phone not a pro tool. They should go with Pro = professional use and Ultra = high end.
iPhone and iPhone Ultra
Watch and Watch Ultra
iPad and iPad Pro or Ultra (it depends if they finally make it useful for Pros)
Macbook and Macbook Pro
Mac (mini) and Mac Pro (fka Studio)
I don’t know if the iMac should exist. It sells probably too well to get rid of it but its not environmentally friendly enough. Have to trow away the whole thing instead of just buying a new box. Maybe offer a third display for like 799 for the Mac mini.
The term Pro is appropriate a think.

The iPhone is a professional tool, it has always been of course (businessman have been used mobile phone from decades now) but now some people work from their phones, from content creators to 3D scanning.

So I think Apple can continue to use word Pro, but ditch Air (it was a marketing term for designate thin model, but today all model all thin compared to the introduction of Air)

So :

iPhone - iPhone Pro
iPad- iPad Pro
MacBook - MacBook Pro
iMac - iMac Pro
Mac (Macintosh please Apple) - Mac Pro
Apple Watch - Apple Watch Pro
Etc…

Seem to be the best lineup for me
 
So My 2019 with Vega 2 Duo is still faster on the GPU side than any Apple silicon ( M2 Ultra is close ). The CPU is outmatched completely though M4 Pro is over 80% faster in multi-core performance and 2.5 times faster in single-core performance than the Intel Mac Pro 2019. The issue of course is Apple's price points. My Vega 2 Duo was 5K in 2019, at release it was the fastest card out there for about 4 months until the next Nvidia release... and runs 64gb Vram!

I love the PCIE expansion for raid cards. The NVME speeds are incredible for video work.

If they were to redesign the Mac Pro now. Needs to be smaller and lighter with perhaps 4 slots rather Than 8.

I had heard a rumour ( someone I know overhearing Apple staff at WDC ) they we're working on an Apple GPU. Basically stacked GPU and ML cores... for internal AI stuff and for discreet GPU. I suspect they would love to release something that could blow the 5090 out the water.
 
The Mac Pro makes no sense. You can't upgrade the CPU, you can't upgrade the RAM, you can't use the GPUs that everyone is using, yet it's in a huge box that's mostly empty. It has a ton of cooling for chips that don't produce heat. And it's very expensive.

The whole point of the Mac Pro is to have a PC tower style computer that can be upgraded whenever you want and thereby future-proofed, so that you don't need to put it in the trash every time you need some new hardware.

Apple's closed, soldered-on, proprietary, incompatible and unsupported mindset is the complete antithesis of the Mac Pro. It has not worked ever since they introduced the trash can, and will never work again.

Imagine if you could shove an Nvidia GPU in there, use 3rd party RAM, and use whatever storage you like. Then it would make sense, even at a high price. But Apple wants to eat the cake and have it too: let's make it expensive, huge AND non-upgradeable. Why?

Why don't Mac people get to use NVidia and CUDA in the AI age? You're forced to rent GPUs, buy a PC or just miss out of the biggest revoluton happening right now in the world, all because Apple dropped the ball so many times that it's now beyond recovery.
 
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Apple's closed, soldered-on, proprietary, incompatible and unsupported mindset is the complete antithesis of the Mac Pro. It has not worked ever since they introduced the trash can, and will never work again.
You don’t think the 7,1 fits your model of what a Mac Pro should be? If not, why not?

The 6,1 (trash can) had slotted RAM, slotted storage and a socketed CPU. None of this was soldered on. The GPU cards were removable and replaceable - that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that it was near-impossible to buy stand-alone upgrades/replacements.

The two main issues with the 6,1 were thermal Management and not nearly enough software support for multiple GPUs.

With all due respect, whlle I understand the intention of your post, your “facts” are wrong.
 
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Just because Gurman hasn’t heard anything doesn’t mean it is dead. However considering Apples silicon doesn’t play nice with pretty much the majority of none Apple expansion cards, I will not be surprised if it is written of either.
 
Thanks for stating the obvious!

I honestly don't get the point of the Mac Pro in the ARM architecture days. It can't use third party GPUs and the memory is not upgradeable. Sadly, the expandable desktop format just doesn't fit with the embedded architecture Apple has gone with in their ARM chips.
 
Shame. The Mac Pro is literally the best product Apple has ever made. But they just don’t care about it at all. It’s pathetic and sad of Apple’s leadership to care so little about this amazing product.
 
Mac Studio with 2x M.2 slots underneath and call it a day.

PCIe slots available is a nice to have for some, but it’s such a small percentage of Apple’s consumer base that it would make sense for them to move on from the tower.
 
Almost 20 years ago I bought a Mac Pro while also in college. (So back in the good edu discount days). Seems like it was $1999. Upgraded the ram. Had four internal drives to mirror. Two SuperDrives. Could burn two discs at one time, so amazing. Had a small radio show and a podcast and people would write me and ask to mail discs of the sermons. Ended up selling it to someone in Georgia. I remember boxing it up and driving away with it. The good ol days. Relatively speaking I guess that was most powerful computer I’ve ever had compared to the current lineups. I’ve never upgraded a car but I remember over time upgrading those Hynix ram sticks and filling the empty drive bags during Black Friday sales. Think it had 160gb hard drives in it.
 
You don’t think the 7,1 fits your model of what a Mac Pro should be? If not, why not?

The 6,1 (trash can) had slotted RAM, slotted storage and a socketed CPU. None of this was soldered on. The GPU cards were removable and replaceable - that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that it was near-impossible to buy stand-alone upgrades/replacements.

The two main issues with the 6,1 were thermal Management and not nearly enough software support for multiple GPUs.

With all due respect, whlle I understand the intention of your post, your “facts” are wrong.
It required proprietary GPUs. You couldn't just put any GPU in there like you could with the previous Mac Pro, you had to choose from a handful of GPUs that were never upgraded. Can you go and buy any GPU and put it in the trash can Mac Pro? Nope. The number of GPUs you can buy that fits inside the trash can is exactly zero.

You could not put a SATA SSD or hard drive in there or any non NVME storage.

The RAM was the only realistically upgradeable thing in that machine. Everything else was pretty much pointless to upgrade.

And yes, you could replace the GPU and the CPU in theory but as you say there were hardly any actual options to upgrade to, so what's the point? That's not much better than if it was soldered on.
 
The Mac Pro makes no sense. You can't upgrade the CPU, you can't upgrade the RAM, you can't use the GPUs that everyone is using, yet it's in a huge box that's mostly empty. It has a ton of cooling for chips that don't produce heat. And it's very expensive.
It makes sense if you have a pile of PCIe cards you need to use that arent GPUs. That’s a rather niche market comparatively, but it does exist, especially in the audio and production spaces
 
No way. The M2 Ultra is on TSMC N5 (still very much in volume production. Can even slap a "made in USA" label on the wafer. Apple has 'spend in the USA' commitments ). N5 is on TSMC N3P . No way that is moving to something 'cheaper'. The ony way N3P is going to be cheaper is if it is dramatically smaller die. Anything "Ultra" class probably is not smaller.

There are reports that the PCC nodes are M2 Ultra. If so that is the other psudo-product keeping the volume high enough to put through wafers at a low rate. Mac Pro actually produces revenues in that case ( where PCC really produces nothing. pure cost center).

If PCC moved over to M4/M5 generation then perhaps a change in the months ahead, but Studio dumping the M2 Ultra relatively quickly pragmatically meant that the Mac Pro needed to keep consuming them (even at a relatively very low rate) since can't dump these sized SoC into the trash can on a almost yearly basis. ( I suspect the M3 Ultra may be a money looser chip and get dumped at some point. But Apple isn't going to do that every generation. )
All fair points, I think a lot probably hinges on the PCC nodes
 
I love Mac Pro, I love internal expansion and huge internal storage. I hope they will at least put M5 Ultra in it and continue the line. However, the real deal would be for Apple to make some M5 based GPU card, maybe G series processors with only GPU cores? A lot of them! And then put such superpowerful GPU into Mac Pro as options for 3D artists and architects...
 
I love Mac Pro, I love internal expansion and huge internal storage. I hope they will at least put M5 Ultra in it and continue the line. However, the real deal would be for Apple to make some M5 based GPU card, maybe G series processors with only GPU cores? A lot of them! And then put such superpowerful GPU into Mac Pro as options for 3D artists and architects...
Ok. But how would that discrete GPU connect to the CPU in an Apple Silicon based system? Would it have its own discrete unified memory and how would that discrete unified memory interact with the memory on the CPU SoC. Would if effectively be a separate computer, just on a card form factor?

One of the problems here is that people are applying x86 CPU + RAM + PCIe + GPU + GPU VRAM models to Apple's SoCs.

Also, when we're talking about "superpowerful" GPUs these days, we're not talking about using them for graphics - we're using them for no graphical compute. NVIDIAs compute GPUS don't even support a lot of graphics use case, e,.g. gaming.

I'd argue the Studio M4 Max, in terms of well over 90% of "traditional" graphics-intensive work, has already enough capacity in terms of GPU performance. The Studio M3 Ultra is aimed for at running relatively large LLMS locally, but might also be preferable to the M4 Mac if you're doing a lot of high-end video rendering.
 
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Outside of the pure processing power of Apple Silicon, the AS Mac Pro is a machine with a *lot* of compromises that are very important to the admittedly small market and work use cases for these machines. AS was simply not designed with expansion in mind and the people who would spend the money on these things are certainly aware of that.
 
It required proprietary GPUs. You couldn't just put any GPU in there like you could with the previous Mac Pro, you had to choose from a handful of GPUs that were never upgraded. Can you go and buy any GPU and put it in the trash can Mac Pro? Nope. The number of GPUs you can buy that fits inside the trash can is exactly zero.

You could not put a SATA SSD or hard drive in there or any non NVME storage.

The RAM was the only realistically upgradeable thing in that machine. Everything else was pretty much pointless to upgrade.

And yes, you could replace the GPU and the CPU in theory but as you say there were hardly any actual options to upgrade to, so what's the point? That's not much better than if it was soldered on.
The CPU was a standard Xeon, the ram were standard sticks and yes, you can put standard NVMes in a 6,1.

You’re also still ignoring the existence of the 7,1.

Soldered on CPUs and memory only appeared in a Mac Pro with the 8,1, because it’s the only Mac Pro with an AS SoC

And you’re shifting the goalposts a lot from your previous post.
 
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You could not put a SATA SSD or hard drive in there or any non NVME storage.
Ok, but NVMe was and is a perfectly cromulent drive standard, just because it didnt support every drive format in existence doesnt mean it wasnt upgradeable in that respect
The RAM was the only realistically upgradeable thing in that machine. Everything else was pretty much pointless to upgrade.

And yes, you could replace the GPU and the CPU in theory but as you say there were hardly any actual options to upgrade to, so what's the point? That's not much better than if it was soldered on.
There were and are tons of CPU upgrade options and cracking the machine apart to swap the CPU isnt terrible. Mine, bought with a quad, has a 12 core in it these days. It wasnt difficult to swap in.

The GPUs were the only real problem as far as upgradeability of the internal components went (lack of PCIe slots aside)
 
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