How many Pro buyers actually upgrade the RAM in the lifetime of their purchase? That's a data point worth looking at.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
New Mac Pro With M2 Ultra Chip Might Launch This Spring Alongside macOS 13.3
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
How many Pro buyers actually upgrade the RAM in the lifetime of their purchase? That's a data point worth looking at.
Kind of sounds like the only difference between the Mac Pro and the Mac Studio will be if you want internal PCIe or are happy to use external PCIe over Thunderbolt.
TheYayAreaLiving 🎗️
Suspended
Assuming this report is accurate, two relevant points come up:
Apple is testing a new version of the Mac Pro running macOS 13.3, according to a tweet shared by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman today.
Given that macOS 12.3 was released in March 2022 and macOS 11.3 was released in April 2021, it's likely that macOS 13.3 will be released in the spring as well. This timeframe could set the stage for Apple to introduce the Mac Pro at a spring event, shortly before releasing macOS 13.3 with support for the computer. The new Mac Pro is expected to feature Apple's new M2 Ultra chip, but a higher-end "M2 Extreme" chip was reportedly canceled.
Earlier this week, Gurman said the new Mac Pro will have the same design as the 2019 model, but lack user-upgradeable RAM.
In an October edition of his newsletter, Gurman said the long-awaited 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with M2 Pro and M2 Max chips would also be tied to macOS 13.3, suggesting that the notebooks could be announced this spring as well.
Gurman has previously claimed that a new Mac mini is in the works with M2 and M2 Pro chip options, but he hasn't commented on the Mac mini recently. It's certainly possible that it gets announced alongside the new Mac Pro and MacBook Pro models. In the meantime, Apple continues to sell Intel-based Mac Pro and Mac mini configurations.
Apple has not released any new Macs since the MacBook Air with the M2 chip in July.
Article Link: New Mac Pro With M2 Ultra Chip Might Launch This Spring Alongside macOS 13.3
1. Are the internal storage slot significantly faster than the Thunderbolt ports? if not, no value add there, IMHO.
2. Either way, this is clearly aimed at graphics/videos professionals, who want to throw all the CPU power they can at their tasks. I can easily see them paying a LOT of money for these, because time is money for them.
All Mac Pros before this had user-upgradable RAM. The whole point of having a tower computer is to be able to upgrade certain components. Apple is giving the user the option to upgrade storage and also add PCIe cards... so why not RAM? Apple doesn't always make great decisions, and it is okay to call them out.
I'm curious as to what they're going to do with the Rack Mounted Mac Pro. It has a potential of revolutionizing the server space Apple Silicon's power to energy ratio!
That concept fits your job description I guess. Since you've been stuck on 32 gigs for so long I guess you don't have RAM intensive workflow. I don't remember when was the last time I had 64 in my machine, for close to a decade I had 128 in prosumer towers and 256 of ECC in workstation towers like the latest intel MP or PC. I really hate spending money on RAM because it gets obsolete real quick. Here is an example, currently there is a transition to DDR5 and I have none of them because of two reasons: its so much more expensive than the fastest DDR4 and it's not any faster. For now. But it will be down the road and price will level.
"Pros" aren't a monolithic group, and it's thus often dangerous to make such generalizations.
At one point I used a PowerMac G5 for my research. I purchased the machine with enough RAM for the calculations I anticipated I'd need to make, and that worked fine for a couple of years. But when we decided to simulate a different class of biopolymers (something that couldn't have been readily forseen when the work started), I needed more RAM. Because the RAM was expandable, I was able to upgrade it to meet our new needs.
[The machine was used for development work—I'd make sure it the code was working on a few sample biopolymers, and then send our jobs to the university's clusters.]
University labs, especially in the physical sciences (as opposed to those being supported by large NIH grants), often have tight budgets, and we could not have afforded to buy a new machine just because our RAM needs changed. Besides, since we didn't need a new machine, just more RAM, that would have been wasteful.
So far, Apple has not released ARM drivers for AMD's video cards, and that is why eGPUs don't work with Apple Silicon, because there is no ARM driver for the PCIe device inside (i.e., the AMD video card). But there are ARM drivers for Aquantia 10 Gbe PCIe cards, so those will work if connected to an Apple Silicon Mac in an eGPU enclosure via thunderbolt.
So the question I have is, if Apple is going to have PCIe slots in the upcoming Mac Pro, will they finally release ARM drivers for AMD video cards, will Apple support RDNA3, will eGPUs finally be able to work with Apple Silicon? Or is Apple releasing its own Video Card and getting rid of AMD altogether?
So the question I have is, if Apple is going to have PCIe slots in the upcoming Mac Pro, will they finally release ARM drivers for AMD video cards, will Apple support RDNA3, will eGPUs finally be able to work with Apple Silicon? Or is Apple releasing its own Video Card and getting rid of AMD altogether?
You're right, VFX and Production houses are running networked big box Linux machines.
Highly debatable. What is a "Pro"?
In this world of "Pro" there are varying levels of needs and professionalism. An independent graphic designer may have one need one year but 2 years later may need a new GPU for higher resolution work or they "upgraded" to a 4K monitor which has higher requirements.
Seeing as how bloated and inefficient Adobe software is it isn't unreasonable to upgrade RAM if you need to.
On my 4 year old Dell workstation I've upgraded every thing BUT the CPU as the cost of an i9 from the era is still a little high. Then again what do I know, a side business that generates actual income probably isn't "Pro" to you.
Realistically if you're doing anything creative independently, upgrading existing equipment shows that you're smarter with money over just plunking down thousands for something new and shiny. Used RAM is extremely cheap.
I’d guess no additional GPU power as the SoC is the same as the one in the Studio. And, as Apple hasn’t had a WWDC to reset developer’s expectations on how to code for Apple Silicon GPU’s, more than likely an incremental update.
Heh - I can't remember a time when the rumors have been so all over the place. All the usual suspects are out there swinging in the dark in an attempt to keep people's attention, but nobody has any friggin' clue what's coming, or when.
It depends on how purist Apple remains about the unified memory architecture. Does it make sense to have a massive pool of RAM but either not enough processing to utilize it efficiently or not enough bandwidth to feed those processors? Keeping it on package and scaling by adding packages means RAM, bandwidth and processing scale together.
I'm afraid it won't have GPU slots either since they seem all in on this integrated SoC even for a desktop workstation.
It would have to be slower, so you could only upgrade capacity while lowering performance. It's a tradeoff with this architecture.
All of this defeats the purpose of why they made a SOC. What you're asking for is basically a more traditional PC configuration, separate CPU, GPU, RAM, HD, and all the BUS's and controllers that go with that. Again, it's a different system with M1/2.
see above.
see above. In the current build of M1/2. It doesn't allow for that. It would also make the system bigger, as explained by someone else.
The speed of the RAM apple currently developed works MUCH faster than traditional. Which is why they went with a SOC. As everything is faster, GPU memory is also almost all the system memory. Which is more than any other GPU can offer. The trade off, not expandable.
Lol ok so you never technically said the words “it’s not a pro device”. You’re just saying it’s a joke aka bad excuse for a pro device.
How is that practically any different?? You just want to make clear that out of 100 “pro”-ness, you give it a 1 instead of 0? 😂
Servers are another thing. But, we treat it similarly. 5 year refresh cycle. And we plan ahead. How much we use currently, and forecast as best we can. What we will expect to need over the next 5. Again, best guess. We tend to overshoot as we expect unexpected needs. The solution we have today should cover us VERY well for the next 3 years (2 years into it).
I kinda wished that the high end model represents a doubling of what the M1 ultra offers even if it isn't all one big SoC.
Imagine if it offered 40 core CPU, 128 core GPU, 64 core neural engine, 1.6 TB/s memory bandwidth, 256 GB RAM. Then with SSD storage I wonder how much it can offer?
They may complain about that upfront cost. But, every single time they ask us if we can do "something". It's always a firm YES. We don't get calls about performance issues, or how quickly we can deliver a new server (VM).