No, you see, it has an Apple logo on it. I have ALWAYS bought the top of the line thing with the Apple logo on it! I don’t want to live in a world where I can’t have the top of the line thing with the Apple logo on it!
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New Mac Pro Features Upgradeable SSD, Apple Selling 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB SSD Kits
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Nvidia wrote drivers for the Turing (RTX 2000) series of GPUs - Apple refused to sign them.
Nvidia isn't the hold up - Apple is.
By "existing", I meant products you can actually use right now. In other words, does a PCIe bus exist in AS or is Apple adding some sort of PCIe support chip to get PCIe in the Pro?View attachment 2213164
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.
You are completely missing my point on my reply. Just because the slot is there doesn't mean anything you can put in it will work in macOS. DRIVER support. Heard of it? Windows has lots of hardware support IN the operating system. Does macOS have driver support for the tons of existing PCIe adapters? I can put a Dell PERC RAID controller in the Mac Pro and it will work? That's my point. It may fit, but it may not work.
I'm alive and well, thank you.
Yes
www.ipi.wiki
Ampere Altra Developer Platform
Ampere Altra Developer Platform – A COM-HPC reference platform for embedded apps, with up to 128 Arm cores, PCIe Gen4, 10GbE, and pre-installed Ubuntu Server.
www.ipi.wiki
Is this what most people call a PC though? This appears to be an ARM machine?Yes
Ampere Altra Developer Platform
Ampere Altra Developer Platform – A COM-HPC reference platform for embedded apps, with up to 128 Arm cores, PCIe Gen4, 10GbE, and pre-installed Ubuntu Server.
I understood your point from the beginning. And I think you're overly cautious to the point of being paranoid.
We'll watch those OWC listings I posted a few pages back. I guarantee you in short order they'll add "Mac Pro 2023" to the list of supported hardware.
Curious was this tiny market segment due to slower model releases or the big snafu of the Mac Pro trash can of 2013-2017 which pretty much drove so many Mac Pro users to custom Windows PC configs running Intel i9/AMD cpu's with AMD/NVidia cards? Or did the two not have the causality and affect relate to one another?
I was there - yes to both. It was over 2,000 days from the release of the 6,1 to the release of the 7,1.
The 1,1 to 5,1 Mac Pros were general purpose workstations - they used industry standard parts and were priced competitively.
Then P.T. Barnum & Sir Idiot Boy decided that what was truly important for a workstation was it's looks, not it's performance. So they rehashed the G4 Cube and gave us the 6,1 aka, the trashcan. Shrinking a desktop down to a small cylinder required removing the thing that workstation users needed - expandability.
This picture explains it best:
The bill to replace the missing functionality was around $2,000. The true believers told everyone that we should just readjust our workflows to what the trashcan could actually do, along with a very unhealthy dose of why do you need that?
In my case, to move to a trash can, I would also need to buy:
1. A 5 bay external thunderbolt 2 enclosure for my internal hard drives.
2. A 4 bay external thunderbolt 2 enclosure for my back up system.
3. An external thunderbolt 2 enclosure for my Blu-ray Player.
4. An external dock to connect my USB sticks, my scanner, and other peripherals.
All of these would have power bricks of indeterminate quality, in addition we would need to add a rats nets of cables, introducing yet more points of failure in the system.
Speaking of points of failure, lets start with the video cards.
The D700 GPU (of which there were 2) would get cooked in the enclosure - Sir Idiot Boy simply didn't understand the concept of heat dissipation. Apple replaced a lot of D700s. Added bonus - the idiots at apple put the GPU ROM on the motherboard. This means that to move to the next generation of graphics cards, the entire motherboard would need a refresh.
Sir Idiot Boy also thought that everyone would rewrite their software to take advantage of the 2 GPUs, which of course, never happened.
The design also ensured that the user could peg either the CPU or the GPU. You could not peg both of them, and neither of them could be pegged for very long, which kinda defeated the purpose of a workstation - but hey, it really looked good sitting on the executives desk, and that is what really matters.
This was also the time when we got the NAND memory modules instead of real sata ssd drives, meaning they were not end user replacement parts.
The all in one enclosure also meant that if anything went down - the entire machine had to go back to Apple, and you would have no idea of when it would come back. If you didn't have a spare, you were dead in the water until the trashcan came back.
None of this was conducive to workflows that needed a workstation. But hey, they looked great sitting there on a desk, and that is what truly matters, amirite?
By 2016, the surviving trashcans that were on corporate leases were ready for replacement. The problem was Apple didn't have a replacement - all Apple offered was to lease the exact same product, or a Imac Studio Pro, which had all of the disadvantages of the trashcan, with an added side of screen roulette.
In 2017, Ryzen arrived and completely changed the industry. 15 - 25% IPC gains generation to generation came back into play, and the Apple "offerings" were nothing more than dongles for Final Cut and Logic. At this point, people are starting to look for the exits, or going the Hackintosh route and having much, much faster Mac Pros than anything Apple could deliver.
Apple went on the apology tour to tell the dwindling faithful that we hear you, and we have an incredible product coming.....
The incredible product was the Mac Pro 7,1. An overpriced 2016 workstation released in 2019. Every single subsystem was obsolete on the day it was released. Everything from the 14+++nm CPUs to the PCIe 3.0 I/O. The base model was shipped with an AMD video card that was 2 generations back when it was released.
A $1,200 Ryzen system could out perform it on many tasks, and Apple and the remaining true believers continued to dream up edge cases where the 7,1 would out perform a Threadripper or Eypc based AMD system.
In fields that need workstations, companies want things like road maps - Apple doesn't deliver that, and hasn't for well over a decade. Apple isn't a computer company - they are a luxury phone company that dabbles in computers and software.
Attachments
Both are blips on the much bigger chart where, back in 2005, laptops outsold desktops for the first time. Sales of all Mac desktops have been dropping along with the rest of the industry. By 2013, unit sales of desktop Macs were already down to 20% of all Macs Apple sold, and the Mac Pro was, of course, a small slice of that even then. So, 2013-2017-2020-2023 all of that has been VERY tumultuous for those still paying close attention to the high end desktop Mac market. But, as a portion of Apple’s revenues, as a portion of Apple’s unit sales… Mac Pro’s have been a rounding error for a long time.
Do those programs tend to involve a lot of random-access writes into the data, which would make a very large amount of what would effectively be L4 cache, or is it mostly read-only or sequential writes where the SSD is fast enough to not need that?
Hysterical.
2012 12-core Mac Pro, 1GB HD 5770 video card, 12GB Ram, 1TB 7200rpm ATA drive. ...for $3,800.
The 2013 8-core Mac Pro 8-core had dual D700 FirePro GPUs (crappy), 12GB Ram, and 256GB SSD storage. ...for $5,000.
The 2019 8-core Mac Pro with a crappy 8GB 580X video card, 32GB of RAM and 256GB SSD storage. ...for $6,000.
The 2019 Mac Pro with an 24-core upgrade, had a crappy 8GB 580X video card, 32GB Ram, and 256GB SSD Storage. ...for $12,000
in 2023, you get a 24-core Mac Pro, with a 60-Core GPU, Media Engine processing, 64GB Ram, 1TB SSD Storage for $7,000. ...on top of that, this Mac Pro will be silent, and the Mac OS finally feels stable with Apple Silicone. No unexpected shut downs, beachballs of death, nor kernel panics that plagued the Intel Macs. ...192GB of RAM upgrade for $1,600. $800 used to be a 32GB upgrade.
The Mac Pro is finally worthy of it's pricing (again - since 2009), and people are still complaining it's not $3,000...
If you want a cheaper workstation, do what I did in 2017......go build your own custom PC.
If developers took the time to write an app for the Mac Platform, they'll rewrite apps for the Apple GPU, plus figure out ways to use the media engine for app acceleration.
People who have a business need for a computer that starts at $7000. Everybody else should just buy a Mini, or if they do heavy photo/video/audio a Studio.
Obviously the use cases for workstations have changed. There is probably nobody commenting on this board who is currently in the market for one or should buy one, so why is everybody complaining? If you don’t need it, don’t buy it. For your gaming needs, there are a ton of options. This machine is for businesses that edit movies and have other very high end needs. It comes in a rack mount version.
Are you an insider who has the specs of these ssds and has run speed tests on them? If not, you seem awfully sure of yourself. Dollars to donuts this is not a normal m.2 drive.
No. Are you? There's a saying "extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence" and the idea that Apple has some amazing new flash storage technology that they didn't bother to brag about at WWDC would be an extraordinary claim. I'm just stating well-established facts that you can find with 10 minutes of online browsing.
Nobody is saying that they are normal m.2 drives. However, there is zero reason to believe that they are anything different to the SSDs in the Mac Studio or the M2 Max MacBook Pro, which have been extensively tested and found to be ballpark 5-6 GBps for sequential read/write. That's very good but still only in the same league as the better class of PCIe G4 M.2. drives that sell for ~$100/TB. They may be faster than the (very similar looking) modules for the Intel Mac Pro which use 4-year-old tech.
Apple doesn't make flash storage chips - they're using the same sort of chips as everybody else, connected by a PCIe-like bus like anybody else and the upper limit on the speed is ultimately set by those factors. The difference between M.2 and Apple's modules is that M.2 has the controller on the module and speaks standard NVMe protocols to the CPU whereas Apple have the controller on the Apple Silicon SoC (or on the T2 chip in Intel Macs).
I never thought it would be affordable, but I expected better in terms of compatibility. Especially for a $3000 premium over the Studio.
For that premium I wanted an nVidia graphics card and M.2 compatibility, and Windows support while we’re at it. Now that’s laughable.
I know they say it’s so much faster, but in many ways it’s a downgrade compared to the previous model. And those ways are in my opinion the most important and sometimes only distinguishing factors of the Mac Pro.
It almost seems like they’re doing it on purpose. If my budget is $7000-8000 (before an enormous amount of tax of course), I can get a Mac Studio, and a Vision Pro. Or I can get a Mac Pro with a bunch of empty PCI slots. Kind of makes the decision easy.
They come in a rack mount, but they’ve discontinued all server software. I understand their reasons why but if you’re just running open source servers anyway you can do it for a lot less, you don’t need Apple hardware. You can also get the same compute power in the Studio. I essentially agree with you, it’s supposed to be high end workstation/server class hardware. But that $3000 premium still doesn’t seem worth it for almost any use case.
I’m sure it’s not a normal M.2 drive, but it sure would be nice for Apple to give me the option to use a normal one anyway.
Of course you’re also right that this is the theoretical “me” who has the budget and reason to buy one of these. For that $3000 premium, I could get a Mac Studio and a quite good Windows gaming machine to replace the outgoing Mac Pro. So really it seems that’s the answer to how they solved that.
Overall just seems like an odd approach no matter what one’s use case is, but we’ll see what the people who actually buy them think.
With all that empty space on that $3000 motherboard, you’d think they could include some chips to speak standard protocols to allow things like standard M.2 drives. Now that they’ve gone fully SoC for all core functions, it’s time to expand out and give us more options. But I guess that’s what they’d tell you all those PCI slots are for.
So Apple Silicon can be made to work with modular components. Too bad they are proprietary.
Answered your own question. Sticking a cheap PCIe-to-M.2. adapter in shouldn't be a problem. If you need all the PCIe slots for other things then a dedicated M.2. slot would likely have to steal bandwidth from them. There's even a couple of SATA connectors and an internal USB (I guess Apple will charge $Silly for the mounting bracket again, though).
You might want to backtrack a bit on the "devils advocate/head-in-sand" remarks when, as we learn more about the Apple Silicon Mac Pro, we are finding those PCIe expansion slots don't support GPU cards, unlike the Intel Mac Pro.View attachment 2213164
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.
Ludicrous, isn't it?
I wonder what other cards that work in Intel PCIe slots don't work in AS PCIe slots?Suddenly, I've feeling very alive on this hill after all. 😂
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Graphics cards and memory are a different beast, although I’m vehemently against Apple’s direction on this. With respect to the cards I spoke of and PCIe interoperability, I stand by my words.You might want to backtrack a bit on the "devils advocate/head-in-sand" remarks when, as we learn more about the Apple Silicon Mac Pro, we are finding those PCIe expansion slots don't support GPU cards, unlike the Intel Mac Pro.
Ludicrous, isn't it?
Suddenly, I've feeling very alive on this hill after all. 😂
But enjoy your high horse if you like. I was trying to enlighten you, not put you down.
Loads of mental gymnastics in this thread. Call it for what it is, these SSD prices are a rip off, just like the ones in the rest of the Mac lineup.