New Mac Pro Features Upgradeable SSD, Apple Selling 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB SSD Kits

[Unregistered 4U]

But with the Mac Studio, I can't see how this won't push many potential Mac Pro users to opt for the Mac Studio instead. And considering the price premium for the Mac Pro when compared to the Mac Studio when opting for the same Apple M2 Ultra SoC and the same amount of RAM, Apple surely is making way more per Mac Pro sold compared to the Mac Studio.

For Mac Pro users that need PCIe slots, there’s no PCIe slots in anything but the Mac Pro. IF (and that’s a BIG if) a Intel Mac Pro user
1. NEEDS, like ABSOLUTELY requires the fastest Mac they can buy
2. AND all their cards are Apple Silicon compatible
3. AND all their software is Apple Silicon compatible..

There’s literally no solution other than the Apple Silicon Mac Pro.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

I wonder how big the market is for these pro machines.

Compared to all the other things Apple sells? Very very tiny. Very likely making up WELL less than 1% of their yearly profits.

 

[stevefeinstein]

Wait for OWC to sell a version of this for much cheaper.

 

[Jakexb]

Are these based on a standard like M.2 or are they a custom Apple thing?

 

[Joe The Dragon]

Problem with the Apple SSD situation is that the modules are (a) proprietary and (b) probably can't be cloned by third parties "because security" (AFAIK the Apple Configurator won't accept unofficial parts and without that they won't work) - although with the MP you'll probably be able to use M.2 to PCIe adapter cards as long as the MP has official SSD modules installed in the main slot.

can they make raw ones?? setting how they get fully wiped on change and are linked to the MB. So security may be over blown into vendor lock in.
but setting how they split into an main / extended setup that they have an odd layout.
some configs only seem to use one slot with the extended slot open.

Now the question is with the NEW config tool let you upgrade the stuido with bigger ones or will that be apple service only as the studio is not on the end user upgrade list. Unlike the mac pro.

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

i dont undrestand , can we use only apple's own ssd ?

 

[theluggage]

i dont undrestand , can we use only apple's own ssd ?

In the main SSD slots - yes, and you need one fitted to be able to boot - but it comes with a 1TB drive installed anyhow and that should be more than adequate for a system drive.

However, there's no reason to believe you won't be able to plug a M.2 adaptor into any of the PCIe slots to add extra "drives" and there's even internal SATA ports for spinning rust or 2.5" SSDs (presumably the same $howmuch?! for the offical bracket and power cable, though).

 

[progx]

Why? WHO in their right mind is going to spend $1000 for 2TB of SSD storage for a $999 device or even a $1999 device when Amazon is flooded with 2TB SSD's for around $125?

Maybe I should rephrase for the temperamental, I hope a kind of similar option becomes available for other desktops. I didn’t know the pricing had been released, nor did I catch it in the announcement. However, I don’t see it happening for any consumer level products.

 

[Love-hate 🍏 relationship]

In the main SSD slots - yes, and you need one fitted to be able to boot - but it comes with a 1TB drive installed anyhow and that should be more than adequate for a system drive.

However, there's no reason to believe you won't be able to plug a M.2 adaptor into any of the PCIe slots to add extra "drives" and there's even internal SATA ports for spinning rust or 2.5" SSDs (presumably the same $howmuch?! for the offical bracket and power cable, though).

got it, mostly curious, I dont intend on buying one

don't see why people would buy apple's super expensive SSDs tbf

 

[seek3r]

got it, mostly curious, I dont intend on buying one

don't see why people would buy apple's super expensive SSDs tbf

The main reason is that most of these arent going to be bought by individuals, they're going to be bought by corp IT depts, and overall it'll both make things easier to get through purchasing and probably cost less when counting in man hours and productivity to just pay the extra cost up front be able to get your designer/editor/developer/etc up and running on their new machine quickly.

Like, let's put it this way, if I needed one for personal use I can take the extra time to put in a PCIe card, re-install, etc and save myself a boatload, but If I needed one for work if that even delays my work by a couple days it's already cost the company more that the cost of Apple's upgrade pricing. Add in time for purchasing to buy a few different parts, the IT man hour cost, etc.... and then multiply that by a whole bunch of employees needing these and yeah, it makes sense just to buy the config needed all in one buy except when impossible

 

[Mainyehc]

Apple definitely knocked this mac pro out of the park 🤣🤣🤣.

Are those PCI ports compatible with storage, or just more apple blessed proprietary bs?

They are indeed compatible with standard PCIe SSDs. They mention as much in the official website.

 

[Mainyehc]

It’s cool that they install with a plugin. That means that other companies are going to make them and they will not cost so much. Think OWC as a first company.

Judging by their very compact size, these SSDs don't seem to be conventional SSDs per se, with a controller and whatnot, but dumb NAND modules like the ones found in the Mac Studio, which rely on the M2's own internal SSD controller. Back when the Studio was first launched, there were lots of attempts to upgrade machines with modules from other machines, to no avail, due to an inability to pair them with a number and configuration of modules different from the factory-installed ones.

Here's the thing: these modules being now available mean that it will technically be possible to use different configurations. Whether they require a more involved pairing process, like the old 2019 Intel-based Mac Pro already did, or if the Apple Silicon Mac Pro's firmware and pre-boot OS has some special sauce that allows it to do such pairing automatically, is anyone's guess at the moment, but… French regulators, and hopefully EU ones, will take Apple to task, force them to make pairing tools available and likely enable OWC and others to provide their own competing modules. And, who knows, maybe the also very much modular Studio (its screws are only behind a glued-on ring-shaped foot) will be included in the mix.

It's funny how Left-Wing, or at least Centre and Centre-Right European parties (“Communist”, as some people over there in the US ridiculously call us) are way more liberal and pro-competition than the supposedly capitalist and liberal Republicans and Dems, am I right? Meanwhile, Apple et al. are allowed to lobby all they want against Right-to-Repair legislation. Not here, or not for much longer.

I know I'd love to see third-party modules being made available for my machine at OWC's European store, and I know I would immediately drop my PCIe SSD on an external Thunderbolt 3 SSD as a boot drive and start using the internal one for booting my machine and keeping my main user account again. Until then, I'll be preserving the internal 1TB module as much as I can, kind of like those people who buy a nice couch and cover it with an ugly plastic tarp. 😂

 

[DEMinSoCAL]

PCIe is a standard, just like USB and WiFi. In other words, it demands interoperability. There's no reason these won't work with the new Mac Pros, although I'll concede we won't have proof-positive until people get their hands on one and start testing.

I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts they'll work, though.

I like dollars and doughnuts.

PCIe was developed by Intel and has existed only on boards with Intel (and intel compatible) CPU's. What Apple Silicon's implementation is, nobody knows. What does AS "BIOS" work with? Will SSD cards with RAID controllers work or do you need a driver? PCIe slots have never existed on Apple Silicon so it's hard to say what will or will not work. Like I said, just because it fits doesn't mean it works. In the Windows world, we have software driver support in the OS to make things work.

Does any existing Apple Silicon chip even support PCIe?

 

[trusso]

Does any existing Apple Silicon chip even support PCIe?

Straight from Apple's website for the brand-spanking-new Apple silicon Mac Pro.

As fun as it may be being devil's advocate, stop sticking your head in the sand and understand that the whole reason for keeping the Mac Pro in the lineup is to allow for the PCIe expandability that hardcore professionals demand. So it would be downright ludicrous to not build that PCIe expansion to the same standard that already exists in every other computer, including Apple's own 2019 Mac Pro.

Of all the hills in the world, I can't believe this is the one you seem willing to die on.

 

[jimthing]

I like dollars and doughnuts.

PCIe was developed by Intel and has existed only on boards with Intel (and intel compatible) CPU's. What Apple Silicon's implementation is, nobody knows. What does AS "BIOS" work with? Will SSD cards with RAID controllers work or do you need a driver? PCIe slots have never existed on Apple Silicon so it's hard to say what will or will not work. Like I said, just because it fits doesn't mean it works. In the Windows world, we have software driver support in the OS to make things work.

Does any existing Apple Silicon chip even support PCIe?

For example, there are issues with multi-drive PCIe NVMe SSD support on Macs at the moment. Making RAIDs out of them is difficult because the latest SoftRAID expects you to de-secure your system to use a legacy kext (no thanks!), and Apple RAID is limited and has proven unreliable in recent years. See comments section on this:

Should you trim external SSDs?

Enabling the TRIM command was once thought important to maintain good write performance on SSDs. What has happened to it? Should we still be enabling it?

eclecticlight.co

Basically there are no decent QUIET multi-bay NVMe RAID boxes out there, which use a TB3/4 interface which Apple supports to get the best multi-lane speeds (compared to vanilla USB-C interface ones).

 

[JonathanX64]

Can anyone price out anything comparable on the PC side? To me it looks like the actual intended audience can do things simply not possible on other workstations….

Desktop x64 compared to Apple silicon still has advantages of using cheap standard memory, cheap standard storage, and relatively affordable GPU compute. Cheap in a good sense, of course; these are just parts and they just work, they're not flawed or anything.

Slapping 128 gigabytes of RAM into PC costs about the same as upgrading from M2 with 8 GB to M2 with 16 GB.

4 TB of very fast SSD storage costs about the same as upgrading from M2 256gb to M2 512gb.

Stick to Hackintosh-compatible stuff if you don't like Windows.


So unless Apple gets rid of Apple Tax on their higher-specced computers, I currently see four niches where Mac could excel:

• General-purpose computing — if you need a good premium computer that does usual stuff, you can't go wrong with any modern base-model Mac; it will outperform any similar offerings from Microsoft, Dell, Lenovo, etc.
• Portable computers — Apple silicon beats everything else when it comes to efficiency.
• Workflows that require huge amounts of GPU memory
• Any video processing / editing workflows

 

[Trusteft]

Sickening.

 

[NT1440]

Desktop x64 compared to Apple silicon still has advantages of using cheap standard memory, cheap standard storage, and relatively affordable GPU compute. Cheap in a good sense, of course; these are just parts and they just work, they're not flawed or anything.

Slapping 128 gigabytes of RAM into PC costs about the same as upgrading from M2 with 8 GB to M2 with 16 GB.

4 TB of very fast SSD storage costs about the same as upgrading from M2 256gb to M2 512gb.

Stick to Hackintosh-compatible stuff if you don't like Windows.


So unless Apple gets rid of Apple Tax on their higher-specced computers, I currently see four niches where Mac could excel:

• General-purpose computing — if you need a good premium computer that does usual stuff, you can't go wrong with any modern base-model Mac; it will outperform any similar offerings from Microsoft, Dell, Lenovo, etc.
• Portable computers — Apple silicon beats everything else when it comes to efficiency.
• Workflows that require huge amounts of GPU memory
• Any video processing / editing workflows

So please point me to the device has the ability stream and encode 24 8K streams in real time that isn’t a Mac Pro.

This is a niche product, by definition. But when it’s the only one in the world that can do task X, and you actually NEED to do X…wtf does it matter what Lenovo (my personal favorite) or Dell is charging for RAM in their workstations?

 

[jimthing]

So please point me to the device has the ability stream and encode 24 8K streams in real time that isn’t a Mac Pro.

This is a niche product, by definition. But when it’s the only one in the world that can do task X, and you actually NEED to do X…wtf does it matter what Lenovo (my personal favorite) or Dell is charging for RAM in their workstations?

It is, but that'll be short lived as new GPU's have been announced that will match/surpass this.

 

[NT1440]

It is, but that'll be short lived as new GPU's have been announced that will match/surpass this.

And how much RAM do these cards have access to?

There are still fundamental things that Apple can do with the UMA that x64 simply can’t. Obviously this means there are things that can’t be done on the Mac that are better left to PCs as well.

Brute forcing more GPU power doesn’t negate that some workflows are simply only possible now with UMA.

Buy the tool you need, these are niche items.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

How is this pro-friendly?

"pro" stand for pro-fit... so friendly to Apple.

 

[MallardDuck]

You don't need to rewrite apps for the built-in Apple silicon GPU, that's what the graphics APIs developers should be using are for.

Tell that to all the ones coding for Nvidia specifically.

 

[falainber]

Can anyone price out anything comparable on the PC side? To me it looks like the actual intended audience can do things simply not possible on other workstations….

The only thing this computer can do that's not possible on PC side is to use insanely overpriced SSDs. Oh, and it has PCIe slots that don’t take discrete GPUs. That's quite an achievement.

 

[falainber]

In the main SSD slots - yes, and you need one fitted to be able to boot - but it comes with a 1TB drive installed anyhow and that should be more than adequate for a system drive.

However, there's no reason to believe you won't be able to plug a M.2 adaptor into any of the PCIe slots to add extra "drives" and there's even internal SATA ports for spinning rust or 2.5" SSDs (presumably the same $howmuch?! for the offical bracket and power cable, though).

If M.2 adapter could work it would be stupid for Apple not to have M.2 slots on the motherboard. Also, if the adapters worked who would buy Apple's own overpriced SSDs?

 

[oogje]

...
The kits feature two 1TB SSDs, two 2TB SSDs, or two 8TB SSDs, and replace the existing internal SSD storage of the Mac Pro.

The 8TB kit is two 4TB SSDs, not two 8TB SSDs.