the M1/M2 Max was never built to run alongside 3 other M1/M2 Max chips. perhaps an M3 Extreme could push it over the edge but i'd imagine that apple would just double the price for such a chip alone.
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Mac Studio vs. Mac Pro Buyer's Guide
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LOL, and your year ago comment still holds true today. Reading it, I thought it was recent, but I probably need to upgrade from a SE small screen iphone to a larger screen or get reading glasses…
Mac Pro is required only if one needs expandable storage and access to PCIe expansion slots. Otherwise Mac Studio is more than enough.
If you don't need PCIe slots and the cards you want to put in those slots actually have drivers for Apple Silicon then pay the extra $3000. Otherwise get the Mac Studio and be a happy camper.
Upon the launch of the latest Mac Pro, Apple's transition to Apple silicon across its entire Mac lineup is complete. The new Mac Pro features the M2 Ultra chip – the same chip offered in the refreshed Mac Studio – so why should some prospective customers buy the Mac Pro, despite its $6,999 starting price, and which performance-focused desktop Mac is best for you?
The Mac Studio starts at $1,999, substantially less than the $6,999 starting price of the Mac Pro. When configured with the same M2 Ultra chip as the Mac Pro, the Mac Studio starts at $3,999. There are several crucial differences between the Mac Studio and Mac Pro that justify their different price points and designs:
Mac Studio Mac Pro Integrated, non-upgradeable design with sealed casing Modular design with openable casing and potential for SSD upgrades – Seven PCI Express expansion slots (six available slots; one slot comes with Apple I/O card installed) Two impeller fans Three impeller fans Apple M2 Max or M2 Ultra chip Apple M2 Ultra chip Up to 24-core CPU 24-core CPU 10Gb Ethernet Dual 10Gb Ethernet Up to six Thunderbolt 4 ports Eight Thunderbolt 4 ports Two USB-A ports Three USB-A ports HDMI port Two HDMI ports SDXC card slot (UHS-II) – – Rack-mounted version available Starts at $1,999 Starts at $6,999
The main reason to buy the Mac Pro is to be able to use its seven PCIe expansion slots add the likes of digital signal processing (DSP) cards, serial digital interface (SDI) I/O cards, additional networking, and built-in storage. This also allows a user to change some of their Mac Pro's hardware over time, and Apple is offering additional do-it-yourself SSD upgrade kits and wheels for the device.
If you require multiple Ethernet ports, more than six Thunderbolt ports, or more than two USB-A ports to connect a large number of peripherals, only the Mac Pro can facilitate this. Otherwise, since the Mac Studio can be configured with the same M2 Ultra chip as the Mac Pro, there is no reason to buy the more expensive desktop machine, and most users will be better off buying the Mac Studio and saving $3,000.
Buy a Mac Studio if...
- You prefer a smaller desktop machine that takes up significantly less space
- The M2 Max chip offers sufficient performance for your needs and you do not need the M2 Ultra chip
- You need a versatile, high-performance machine below the Mac Pro's $6,999 starting price
Buy a Mac Pro if...
- You need the ability to upgrade the internal SSD
- You need more than six Thunderbolt ports, more than two USB-A ports, more than one HDMI port, or more than one ethernet port
- You need PCIe expansion slots
If you don't need the performance and number of ports that the Mac Studio offers, it is worth noting that Apple offers the Mac mini with the M2 Pro chip for $1,299. This high-end Mac mini offers a good balance of price and performance that should be more than sufficient for many users looking for a desktop Mac.
The Mac Pro is targeted at professionals with distinct hardware requirements and complicated workflows, often in production environments. These customers will know they need a Mac Pro to meet their needs. Considering the fact that the base model is $5,000 cheaper than the Mac Pro, the Mac Studio is now the best "Pro" desktop Mac for the overwhelming majority of prospective customers, with more than enough performance and versatility for most users.
Article Link: Mac Studio vs. Mac Pro Buyer's Guide
Really happy the Studio exists. Just ordered the M2 Max Studio and happy I didn't have to buy the M2 Pro Mini (which is the same price as the Studio when upgraded to what I want), and happy I didn't have to start at $7K on the other side (with a MUCH larger case that, while nice, I don't need). Only thing I would like to change about it is a darker color but I'll live.
Meh. You could have said that any month for the last 30 years or so, and any month into the future. There's always something better around the corner, but meanwhile you have stuff that needs to be done.
Legit question; it’s extremely relative depending on your use case, but our current number cruncher was equipped with 512GB four years ago, and the specific task it was outfitted for at that time required somewhere near 400GB to do efficiently with the dataset.
However, even at over 4 years old the motherboard on our box maxes out at 2TB (albeit with very expensive 3DS LRDIMMs), and there are situations where you actually need that much for good efficiency, so it's arguable that truly "massive amounts of RAM" is 1TB or more.
By those scales, 192GB isn't much at all. But as with most things, that's very relative--for the vast majority of workflows, even extremely resource-intensive ones, it's not unreasonable to call 192GB a massive amount of RAM. Heck, even the 64GB I have in my two personal machines is way more than I need 99% of the time, and we have people working comfortably on very resource-intensive (albeit mostly CPU-bound) modeling with that much.
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The nice thing about the growing Mac headless / 'computer only' space (Mini, Studio and Pro) is it demonstrates the need for Apple to support and grow its range of Apple monitors. One-size does not suit all, and I hope we see more sizes of Studio displays in the near future (and not ergonomically challenged like the existing Studio Display which sits far too high up, and cannot be adjusted lower).
Yes it is possible that Apple has decided to formally exit the workstation market (as they did the server market) and the 2023 Mac Pro is the final version of the model designed to give 2019 Mac Pro users a temporary bridge to allow them to move their workloads off of macOS and on to Windows or Linux.
It is also possible the 2023 Mac Pro is a "quick and dirty stop-gap" to complete the transition to Apple Silicon so they can focus solely on that architecture for both hardware and software. We have media reports claiming that Apple has encountered serious issues with creating a true workstation-class SoC (the "M Extreme") as well as developing an off-package memory controller with acceptable performance that would allow them to offer terabyte-levels of RAM (their first attempt had poorer memory performance than the 2019 Mac Pro). And Apple has also filed patents to support off-SoC GPU modules. So with enough work and will, Apple could create a true "workstation" class Apple Silicon Mac Pro with scores of CPU cores and hundreds of GPU cores that can access a terabyte-plus of RAM.
Let's check in again around 2025-2026.
Instead of the Mac Pro, you can get the Mac Studio and use the extra $3000 to buy a really good PC. Best of both worlds.
Honestly not a bad plan. It is what I plan to do when it comes time to replace my 2020 iMac 5K and Alienware Aurora R7.
I think the Buyer’s Guide also needs to compare the cost of AppleCare+ between the two Macs. It’s $169 (3 year) for the Studio or $59.99 annually. Apple raised the price for the Mac Pro to $499 (3 year) or $179.99 annually.
Which component on the M2 Ultra Mac Pro is expensive enough for Apple to justify the price increase? Certainly not the SoC which is the same. Probably not the storage modules. And not the case which is the same as the 2019 Mac Pro. It’s $299 (3 year) or $109.99 annually for that one, even with two $6,000 GPUs, a $7,000 CPU, and $25,000 of RAM.
Which component on the M2 Ultra Mac Pro is expensive enough for Apple to justify the price increase? Certainly not the SoC which is the same. Probably not the storage modules. And not the case which is the same as the 2019 Mac Pro. It’s $299 (3 year) or $109.99 annually for that one, even with two $6,000 GPUs, a $7,000 CPU, and $25,000 of RAM.
Ironically, this is exactly what I recommended over a year ago in this very thread. It is only more true today with the current M2 Ultra Mac Pro. You can get an EPYC or Xeon system for not much more than $3000, depending on configuration, or an insanely good i7 or Ryzen CPU and a 4090 AND a well-specced out Mac Studio for less than the Mac Pro (or at minimum, not much more, with the advantage of having more overall compute, storage, GPU, and RAM).
Right now, the new Mac Pro to me, seems like its primary use case is the data center (hence the big call-out to the rack mount version) for video or build systems (and to a lesser-extent, for companies like Amazon and others to sell macOS VMs) that could take advantage of the PCI-e storage arrays. Truth be told, most datacenter-esque shops might be better served by a bunch of Mac Studios and a well-built SAN solution, but there are edge cases where I could see the faster direct storage being necessary.
In fact, there is a part of me that wonders if the primary user of the Mac Pro is actually Apple. For things like Xcode Cloud and the other non-Linux stuff they are running for their various services (most of those tools do indeed run on Linux), not to mention their internal build systems. If you are building out a system that is primarily used by you but might have *some* commercial/enterprise value, I could see going ahead and taking this to market.
I'll keep saying it, its amazing that Apple talks about "spatial computing is the future", and we care about games.. but still can't make a igpu or solution that can compete with a 4 yr old AMD card, let alone Nvidia at 3d. I also won't allow people to plug in an eGPU as a band-aid till they can. I guess everyone is building content for the Mac on Windows.
Im so swapping out my Mac Pro for the M2 ultra Studio. The 2019 Intel Mac Pro is a bit of dog for video editing in Premiere. Even a pretty maxed out one.
I upgraded from a maxed 2017 iMac Pro and honestly there wasn't much performance difference for video editing at least.
I cut a TV show last year and the Mac Pro choked - literally would only playback stuttery 1/4 quality timelines that froze and lagged all the time. And this Mac Pro has an afterburner card, a dual W6800X and 192 gb of ram.
And ironically the thing that saved the show was a M1 Max Macbook Pro that could play several streams of Multicam video without any issues. And in a way 18k's worth Mac Pro couldn't. Disappointing was not the word...
It's also pretty awful at any video codec other than ProRes and constantly chugs on H264s etc. This may have more to do with Adobe's optimisation - but either way video editing is going to be much smoother on apple silicon. And with this release the Mac Pro is pretty much DOA. There is no point to it - it has been put together as such an after thought.
I upgraded from a maxed 2017 iMac Pro and honestly there wasn't much performance difference for video editing at least.
I cut a TV show last year and the Mac Pro choked - literally would only playback stuttery 1/4 quality timelines that froze and lagged all the time. And this Mac Pro has an afterburner card, a dual W6800X and 192 gb of ram.
And ironically the thing that saved the show was a M1 Max Macbook Pro that could play several streams of Multicam video without any issues. And in a way 18k's worth Mac Pro couldn't. Disappointing was not the word...
It's also pretty awful at any video codec other than ProRes and constantly chugs on H264s etc. This may have more to do with Adobe's optimisation - but either way video editing is going to be much smoother on apple silicon. And with this release the Mac Pro is pretty much DOA. There is no point to it - it has been put together as such an after thought.
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I wonder if the wheels of a Steinway d274 aren't already cheaper...
Not sure what they run direct, but from other retail sellers it looks to be around $500, so a bit cheaper than the $700 Apple wants.
I think @ Steinway the are a little more expensive - i am shure that the piano is now between 150 and 180K€... But anyway; Apple is nuts ;-)
Considering that the Mac Pro is basically a Mac Studio with PCIe expansion I'm surprised it took so long to get it out the door to customers.
Thanks for the reply. Those are absolutely incredible numbers. Just a mind boggling amount of data that needs to all be accessed in RAM at the same time. I struggle to even think of what a dataset that goes into the 100gbs would even be (outside of massive video or sound files that have incredible amounts of detail).
I wonder if Apple Silicon can ever be set up to access auxiliary RAM, like a RAM module. Though how that would be much different from an SSD storage chip being accessed, I'm not sure.