neptuna
macrumors member
Exactly my thinking. The use case for a Mac Pro has to be so niche. And Apple probably has the sales data/client relationships to know this. Makes no sense in investing in developing it so heavily.
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Mac Pro Reportedly on 'Back Burner' and 'Largely Written Off' at Apple
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The story with the Pro line is always interesting. It’s the line all tech journo’s and bloggers love to hype up and show as proof that apple is still “their” company. But it’s the line that makes the least sense of anything they do and only caters to a handful of outsized voices. So you hear so much dissent about things like the Vision Pro or the iPhone air and not a peep out of the macosphere about abandoning this product. Interesting…
ZipoBibrok5x10^8
macrumors newbie
My Mac Pros are mission critical, Thunderbolt isn't solid enough for all of the storage, audio and video cards I need to run. My SSD video RAIDs need all the bandwidth I can have. With 8 channel SDI boards, ST2110, Dante cards, and huge SSD arrays, Thunderbolt runs out of bandwidth pretty quick.
Unfortunately, they do not support close to the full bandwidth of PCIe v5, by 16 slots. They cannot even support 100Gb/s Ethernet let alone 200Gb/s or 400Gb/s Ethernet (just one example). nVidia’s Spark supports 200Gb/s Ethernet native.
ZipoBibrok5x10^8
macrumors newbie
My Mac Pros (broadcast video) are full: ST2110 card, 8 channel SDI card, Dante card, SSD arrays, 25 Gb network card. Thunderbolt doesn't have the bandwidth for half of that, let alone all of it.
neptuna
macrumors member
Interesting to hear. So does the current Mac Pro meet your needs, or would a spec bump/major upgrade be needed? Curious as you are Apple's target market for this device and would love to hear from people that actually use it, not "regular users" like me who can only speculate.
No, they only offer 80Gb/s using Thunderbolt 5. Even a PCIe 5 by 2 slot offers more bandwidth than that (128Gb/s) while a by 16 slot offers 1024 Gb/s. With PCIe 6 (launching next year all those numbers double). Thunderbolt 5 does not even come close (nor will Thunderbolt 6 if we ever get it).
Used in most Design studios around the world.
It's not like it's new tech... It's a motherboard and the latest chip. I expect it's pretty easy to up date in the great scheme of things.
but the difference in price with the studio is insane.
$7k Starting point ( with older chip )
$2k for Studio
If they stated it at $4k they would sell more. it be a seriously expensive case.
I'll stick with my 2019 until the GPU is a least double the 38Tflop of the Vega 2 Duo.
Previously, LPDDR RAM (which offers speed vs. power - & probably reliability - advantages) had to be soldered. There is now a plug-in version called LPCAMM launched a year or two back but it seems to have sunk without trace, and there probably wouldn't be much cost saving if only Apple were using it (remember the super-expensive FB-DIMMs on the original Mac Pro?) The problem is Apple's ridiculous mark-up on RAM & miserly base specs - without which people would just get plenty of RAM on day 1. That's probably not gonna change just now with RAM prices spiking. Also, they'd need a different SoC to address the sort of 1TB+ RAM configurations the 2019 Mac Pro could do.
...and most of the "spare" PCIe bandwidth driving the on-chip TB controllers doesn't exist off-chip so unless the TB ports can somehow be configured to PCIe pass-through (no evidence of that in the Mac Pro) you're talking about Apple making a new SoC with PCIe replacing Thunderbolt.
A discrete GPU defeats the whole object of Apple Silicon which is to have the on-chip GPU, Neural Engine, SSD controller sharing the same unified memory. Apple need software developers to optimise their products to take full advantage of Apple Silicon. What you're describing is a system that's always going to be not quite as good as the best x86 chips (or purpose-built server-class ARM chips from NVIDIA, Ampere, AWS et. al.) with the same GPUs that NVIDIA or AMD produce for PCs.
Apple Silicon is a great system for laptops and small-form-factor - but if you want a big box'o'slots it's just not the right tool for the job.
Do you use any specialist PCIe I/O cards (such as massively multi-channel audio or video interfaces) that can take advantage of 8+ lane PCIe slots and/or PCIe4 speeds? That is pretty much the only reason for getting a 2023 Mac Pro (adding lots of internal SSD is nice... but probably not a deal-maker). The 2023 MP exists because Apple had a critical mass of customers in that situation - particularly audio production where Mac is still something of an industry standard. If not, just pretend that the Mac Pro was dropped in 2023.
They did - it's called the Mac Studio.
Why? That chassis was entirely designed around a triangular core heatsink with 1 CPU and 2 GPUs - and even that didn't work too well & was partly based on designer lust. It's completely inappropriate for a modern single-SoC Mac.
It's also the worst possible shape for anybody making rackmount brackets etc.
Why "a series of external drives"? If money is no object, shop around for a multi-bay NAS or TB storage unit. Unless you *need* separate drives - it's a while back, but last time I was in a video studio where they had tower PCs which could all take loads of internal storage they were still using externals because that way they could have 1 drive per project. Also, in a studio environment, spinning-rust Thunderbolt or NAS storage can be tucked away in another room or soundproof cabinet.
A better "Apple Silicon" take on the Mac Pro would be a Studio in a proper 1U (but light and shallow) rackmount form with a bunch of TB ports on the back so it could all be racked up neatly with storage, AV equipment etc. (given many of the target environments use racks anyway). Currently, there are plenty of rackmount brackets for the Studio and Mini which allow that sort of thing anyway.
I'm sure that we'd have seen a M3 Ultra Pro now if Apple thought it would sell well. However, the 2023 MP has a very narrow audience with "legacy" needs. It's pretty clear that a lot of contributors to this thread wouldn't be satisfied by a mere M2 to M3 bump.
I suspect that pretty much everybody interested in a $7000 MxUltra with non-GPU PCIe slots has already got one and will be looking to get at least 3 years of use out of it. Even with the lower-end Macs there's not much incentive to upgrade by a single CPU generation.
It's quite possible that Apple will just drop the Mac Pro once customers have had a bit more time to switch to Thunderbolt-based solutions. However, I wouldn't send out a search party until the next Ultra variant appears - that will offer a more significant boost in CPU/GPU power and bring the PCIe slots (the main reason for the current Pro's existence) and there will be a bunch of people on a 3 year replacement (or lease) cycle looking to replace their M2 Pros.
Now, that I agree with.
The 2019 Mac Pro was grotesquely over-engineered while not actually being very well designed.
The only interesting part was the MPX slot concept which cut down on internal spaghetti when it came to feeding power to PCIe cards and plumbing GPUs into Thunderbolt sockets... and mostly lost its point once the 2023 dropped GPU support.
That left gems such as needing expensive brackets and special cables for adding hard drives, putting said hard drives right in the exhaust from the PSU fans, having the RAM access on the bottom in the rackmount version, having the power button and USB on top of a case that was often going to be kept under the desk... and that elaborate 3d-milled front panel/dust input that must have cost a fortune. Not exactly deal-breakers - but very much form-over-function rather than attention to detail. Then there's the fundamentally flawed concept of making a one-size-fits-all solution for everybody from someone who just wants a desktop Mac with a half-decent, upgradeable dGPU to people who wanted a $50k quad-GPU, 1.5TB RAM monster workstation. Of course, it turned out that the first group need not apply (the price of the entry level Mac Pro doubled - to pay for far more expandability than you'd need with a base spec worse than an iMac) and while the value-for-money got better when you packed in $$$$$ worth of expansion, it was still a one-size-fits-all Xeon-W monolith in a price range where PC/Linux offered scalable multi-CPU Xeons, Threadrippers, specialist multi-GPU motherboards, proper server hardware with redundant PSUs, hotswap, lights-out management (oh, and NVIDIA/CUDA)...
Darth Tulhu
macrumors 68020
I don't use Macs for work, and even if I did I wouldn't need such horsepower in my field.
But from a personal use perspective, I think that computers have become so powerful that this seemed inevitable to me years ago. My MacBook Air M2 still to this day FAR EXCEEDS my computing needs.
Once the iPhone became the sun in Apple's ecosystem, the Mac Pro days were numbered.
Then the Apple silicon transition and the arrival of the Mac Studio made it ABUNDANTLY clear.
With the addition AI, mature cloud services, etc., the computing landscape has and will continue to reduce the need for such machines but for VERY few. So, the Mac Pro will go the way of the XServe.
But from a personal use perspective, I think that computers have become so powerful that this seemed inevitable to me years ago. My MacBook Air M2 still to this day FAR EXCEEDS my computing needs.
Once the iPhone became the sun in Apple's ecosystem, the Mac Pro days were numbered.
Then the Apple silicon transition and the arrival of the Mac Studio made it ABUNDANTLY clear.
With the addition AI, mature cloud services, etc., the computing landscape has and will continue to reduce the need for such machines but for VERY few. So, the Mac Pro will go the way of the XServe.
turbineseaplane
macrumors Penryn
Huh?
Just make the main drive socketed on the Studios, like it is right now on the Mini & Mini Pro.
Not even close. As I pointed out, Thunderbolt 5 cannot even replicate a PCIe 5 by 2 slot, let alone a by 16. Our Mac Pros all have 100s terabytes of NVMe storage and 100Gb/s Ethernet.
Once again you are simply wrong. A Mac Studio with Thunderbolt cannot support even 100Gb/s Ethernet, let alone Blackmagic Design’s dual 100Gb/s SMPTE 2110 card. Its external storage would top out at 10GB/s, nothing compared to what one can do on PCIe 5 with by 16 slots, etc.
Galas
macrumors regular
As much as I would like to disagree. This is exactly right
Mac no longer has a workstation grade pro product. If you think Mac Studio is enough, what a joke then especially since M3 Ultra is close to RTX 4070.
Even Final Cut Pro is now considered as NOT professional software since Apple ignored the open letter from 2022 by not improving and adding pro features. It's a terrible software for professional unless you are a single user. I have many to discuss about the fall of Final Cut Pro but all I can tell is that Apple dont care about it that much after they shrink their own pro software team.
Apple limited themselves and therefore, it's only a matter of time before Mac ecosystem shrinks.
Even Final Cut Pro is now considered as NOT professional software since Apple ignored the open letter from 2022 by not improving and adding pro features. It's a terrible software for professional unless you are a single user. I have many to discuss about the fall of Final Cut Pro but all I can tell is that Apple dont care about it that much after they shrink their own pro software team.
Apple limited themselves and therefore, it's only a matter of time before Mac ecosystem shrinks.
What a joke. Tell that to RTX 5090 PCs and workstations.
Apple had limited themselves with performance and it will only limit the amount of software. Why would anyone want to limit the performance while claiming Mac as a professional computer? How ironic.
Also, killing Mac Pro means killing their own servers as well cause Apple Silicon's performance sucks compared to Google TPU and Nvidia B100.
CWallace
macrumors G5
For the actual users of the Mac Pro 8,1, is there a big demand from them for a more powerful model?
One actual user noted they use theirs to handle the audio input of almost 200 microphones via a PCIe card. Now do they handle the mixing of those inputs on the Mac Pro, or do they offload that to another Mac with a more powerful SoC? And if they do handle it on the Mac Pro, then an M2 Ultra is enough to do it, so what would a more powerful SoC offer them that they would replace their current unit with it?
Socketing the SoC on the motherboard is not really an option because each new generation has a faster memory bus. The M5 Ultra will probably have a 50% faster memory bandwidth than the M3 Ultra (1200Gbs vs. 800Gbs) so how much of a performance hit are the CPU and GPU cores going to take with 50% less bandwidth?
And offering a brand new systemboard with the new SoC and memory installed would be incredibly expensive even without the additional "Apple Tax". And those who depend on that Mac Pro for their livelihood are not going to do that swap on their own and it is very likely not something a Genius is going to be able to handle at the Bar. The machine would need to be sent to a dedicated facility which drives the price up even more and means your machine is unavailable for a week or more (including shipping time).
And if you definition of a "pro workstation" is a box that can take the latest NVIDIA consumer GPU, then Apple has not made one since the 2012 model (if not earlier) when they dropped NVIDIA as a GPU OEM.
One actual user noted they use theirs to handle the audio input of almost 200 microphones via a PCIe card. Now do they handle the mixing of those inputs on the Mac Pro, or do they offload that to another Mac with a more powerful SoC? And if they do handle it on the Mac Pro, then an M2 Ultra is enough to do it, so what would a more powerful SoC offer them that they would replace their current unit with it?
Socketing the SoC on the motherboard is not really an option because each new generation has a faster memory bus. The M5 Ultra will probably have a 50% faster memory bandwidth than the M3 Ultra (1200Gbs vs. 800Gbs) so how much of a performance hit are the CPU and GPU cores going to take with 50% less bandwidth?
And offering a brand new systemboard with the new SoC and memory installed would be incredibly expensive even without the additional "Apple Tax". And those who depend on that Mac Pro for their livelihood are not going to do that swap on their own and it is very likely not something a Genius is going to be able to handle at the Bar. The machine would need to be sent to a dedicated facility which drives the price up even more and means your machine is unavailable for a week or more (including shipping time).
And if you definition of a "pro workstation" is a box that can take the latest NVIDIA consumer GPU, then Apple has not made one since the 2012 model (if not earlier) when they dropped NVIDIA as a GPU OEM.
maxoakland
macrumors 68000
They could and should have continued using Intel for machines they didn’t want to compete in the CPU arena. And it would’ve remained upgradable too
Yeah and that will be a mistake. Those users were small in number but big in influence
maxoakland
macrumors 68000
I would be so happy if they decided to admit they were wrong to remove those features.
Which shows that Apple isn’t really green or environmentally friendly. Like security, they use it as an excuse to do unpopular things (like remove chargers and lock down third party apps) while ignoring low hanging fruit like this
turbineseaplane
macrumors Penryn
So much of this is downstream of having Cook in charge.
He's not a Mac guy, and never has been.
I strongly believe there's an alternate reality he was hoping we'd be living in now where it's iPhones & iPads only.
One of my great hopes is that the next CEO feels very differently about the Mac.
He's not a Mac guy, and never has been.
I strongly believe there's an alternate reality he was hoping we'd be living in now where it's iPhones & iPads only.
One of my great hopes is that the next CEO feels very differently about the Mac.
One thing about AI is that it really isn't so concerned about data integrity. An LLM or AI model is an estimation anyways, so if a bit error happens, no big deal.
If you were to head to SC this week or if you head to re:invent in the beginning of dec you’ll see a sea of macbook pros. The tech industry uses a lot of macs. That’s definitely a pro market.
Tyler O'Bannon
macrumors 65816
Seems like the expandability that Thunderbolt offers is more than enough to cover the 0.x% of people that would need a Mac Pro, and probably for less money.
ECC RAM for LLM still matters due to reduced accuracy, training instability, wasted compute resources, file corruption, and more. Without it, it will only limit the size of LLM you can run or otherwise, quite risky. Whenever you have a lot of memory, ECC is necessary.