Only the european union can save the world against this draconian and anti consumer practice.
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New Mac Pro Features Upgradeable SSD, Apple Selling 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB SSD Kits
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okay, serious question....the PCIe slots are for what? I understand as a non-professional that there are things I would be missing, but it has 2x 10GB networking already, seemingly enough I/O for as many random devices most people would want to plug in. This probably doesn't support the add-on cards that were sold for the Intel-based devices and I have to guess companies that need more niche things are running Windows/Linux/etc. anyway.
Not trying to sound annoying, I just actually want to learn what use cases this could fill.
Not trying to sound annoying, I just actually want to learn what use cases this could fill.
Except USB C while maintaining its shape and size has made advancements nearly every year with download speed and bandwidth.
Which PCI 4.0 is exactly as it was when it was introduced.
So yea, PCI 4.0 on a $7000 BASE PRICE machine is LAUGHABLY NEGLIGENT in 2023.
more like, Macrumors forum: complains about lack of AS mac pro that can have expandable ssd, swappable ram, intercheable gpu
apple: only addresses the ssd.
When I was in school I was coding on an SGI that retailed for $90,000. Having your workstation storage upgrade cost 1-2k IS cheap. This is the storage that goes with a system that starts at $7k, has 800gb/s memory bandwidth and 8k/240 output and can process 22 8k video streams simultaneously. You don’t do that with a commodity m.2 drive.
If you don’t want to spend that, I’m sure OWC will come out with an alternative. Or you could just buy the consumer product line instead. Or pay less to get the better drive at the time you buy the computer. Or use a USBC drive. Or offload your archive projects to a NAS or external raid. If you’re not able to budget this stuff, you’re not in the market segment that it’s for. You’re in the market segment that thinks it’s ridiculous that the Pro Display costs more than a gaming display and don’t even have freesync.
I have no idea why people are getting worked up. This is literally the same thing they did for the 2019 one.
Good point. Still, though, I’d recommend not looking into the outlet it has to plug into.
Nonsensical pricing for the storage, as everyone else has commented. Also a ridiculous jump in price between the Studio and the Pro, just to get hold of some PCI slots...
I suspect Apple intended to create a superior Ultra chip for the Pro, or bolt multiple ones together, but failed... and were just like "screw it, just stick the chip we already have in it, and keep charging a damn fortune"
I suspect Apple intended to create a superior Ultra chip for the Pro, or bolt multiple ones together, but failed... and were just like "screw it, just stick the chip we already have in it, and keep charging a damn fortune"
For me that I have original Mac Pro 2019, hearing that these ssd substituted ssds of the previous model makes me go crazy. What if I want to upgrade them? Cannot.
And one more thing: Mac Pro pre 2013 could change logic board With an expanded kit.
it‘s ugly that a power workstation from 2019 with Intel processor cannot be upgraded to M1 With a special kit To do it.
And one more thing: Mac Pro pre 2013 could change logic board With an expanded kit.
it‘s ugly that a power workstation from 2019 with Intel processor cannot be upgraded to M1 With a special kit To do it.
Those prices are high, but when you look at the price of the Mac Pro to beging with it’s targeting a select group of people/creators. I think most people complaining about the price have no need for a Mac Pro and would never buy one. Me included.
That is probably due to the way the CPU (die / soc) is made, it comes with ram and gpu in one block. So no way to provide user upgradable memory expansion.
A lot of people in here annoyed about the cost of the proprietary SSD as if they were going to buy the $7,000 computer in the first place! I agree it’s outrageous *but* this Mac is not made for us. It’s the same reason the stand on the Pro XDR is so expensive. It’s the same reason the wheels are so expensive. It’s because big businesses will hand that money over to Apple without care. Apple isn’t trying to fork you this time, they’re forking other businesses.
I honestly believe the mac studio was a much better thought product.
It is perfect for what it is, at the right price (given the apple tax of course).
I like my M1 Ultra studio and, although I'd love a little more GPU power, it has served me well.
I wonder how different these are than the modules in the Mac Studio? If this means the Studio can also be unofficially upgraded then we'll see 3rd party options very soon. The Pro is just too niche.
Some music & video rigs require(d) PCI expansion cards (although many have moved to thunderbolt). Some heavy computing or server tasks require masses of high-bandwidth storage so either PCI-NVMe cards or fibre/SAN connections. Those are the two tasks I am familiar with. Thunderbolt 3/4 maxes out at 40Gb/s. PCIe 4.0 starts at that speed.
But yes, this machine is very, very niche—even more so that it only has one processor option that is shared with the cheaper Studio.
...and which, today, would be given a run for its money by a $40 Raspberry Pi, let alone a MacBook Air. I don't know what possible relevance you'd think that would have beyond showing how dramatically technology and prices have changed since then. Or, to put it another way, if you had the thick end of a quarter million ($90,000 in 1990 plus inflation) to spend on a specialised system in 2023 there are options that make the $7000 Mac Pro look like an abacus.
"Workstations" - insofar that the term has any meaning beyond marketing - back in the day were a half-way-house between an 8/16-bit PC and a minicomputer using radically different technology. Workstations in 2023 are high-end PCs (or, in this case, Macs) using mostly the same technology as high-end consumer PCs.
It's also exactly the same storage that goes into a $2000 Mac Studio Max with the same bandwidth or a $4000 Mac Studio Max with same processor (unless Apple have gratuitously made the modules a different shape) and - as far as we know - the same flash chips that are soldered into a MacBook Pro and the same chips you'll get on the better class of 'commodity' M.2 card. The difference with a M.2. card is that it is more complex and includes a controller chip, whereas Apple builds that into the CPU. Yes, Apple's method wrings a bit more performance out of the chips but there's nothing magic about the flash chips they use & which account for the bulk of the materials cost.
...with PC workstations you can argue the toss about ECC memory or Xeon processors having extra features, but with the Mac Pro there's no ECC (whether that's important with Apple's LPPDR RAM arrangement is debatable) and the processor is just a scaled-up version of the M2 Pro chip in a $1300 Mac Mini. The only distinction between the Studio Ultra and the Mac Pro is now an over-engineered case and 6 PCIe slots (usable bandwidth c.f. external TB4 enclosures to be announced).
As far as MacOS is concerned, an M.2 card in a PCIe adapter is no different (maybe a tad less latency) to a M.2 card in an external Thunderbolt adapter or the better class of Thunderbolt external SSD. Apple would have to quite gratuitously block it to stop it.
An M.2. slot on the motherboard would have to share (or subtract from) the limited PCIe bandwidth with the other PCIe slots so it's arguably more flexible to let people plug in M.2 adapters (at one point there were also non-M2 full-sized PCIe SSD cards but I don't know if they're still a thing).
Also, I don't want to go to far on a limb here, but I think x86 processors allow some PCIe lanes to be optimised for NVMe use, which would be used to drive the primary M.2 slot. Apple offers their proprietary on-chip SSD controller for that. Apple $$Ds are a tad faster and arguably more secure than regular M.2 - although not necessarily the sort of night-and-day difference that would justify the prices.
Anyway, you can't boot an Apple Silicon Mac without a working Apple SSD and anything 512GB or bigger should be enough for your system and apps - so it pretty much makes sense to use that as your system drive.
It doesn't really matter if the Apple parts are all serialised and the configurator you need to run to get the Mac to boot again after changing the SSD talks to Apple and decides whether you're allowed to use that part. Apple already sell replacement SSD modules for the Studio but you need the serial number of a compatible machine to order them and you're only 'allowed' to use them as like-for-like replacements. It is also true that - because these are raw flash cards with no on-board controller and firmware - there are multiple types of module and the right type has to go in the right slot on the right machine... so it is a bit unclear from what you see on YouTube how much is people doing it wrong and how much is arbitrarily enforced by the configurator (its a rather expensive experiment)... That said, this all stems from Apple's design decision to control upgrading and replacement ("because security") - as anybody who remembers configuring hard drive parameters in a PC BIOS will know.
Relatively speaking. 192 GB of memory is “huge” by prosumer and video professional standards, but it's tiny when compared with the old Mac Pro's 1.5 TB limit. There were certain use cases, such as scientific applications where huge datasets might have to be stored in memory, for which these Apple Silicon Mac Pros are not longer suitable.
I'd love to see Apple offering memory expansion again for those use cases, perhaps in a future iteration of the Mac Pro, but I'm obviously not holding my breath (also, that would discourage users and developers alike to make use of the ultra-fast unified memory architecture; on the other hand, maybe it becoming ubiquitous, and the Mac Studio remaining the obviously more popular machine, will ensure that, so not offering memory expansion on the AS Mac Pro may be overzealous – or even lazy – on Apple's part).
It’s almost like you weren’t the target market for this thing