Yea youre right!
Sliding off the side off a tower and popping in a stick of RAM takes just 5 minutes, that is 5 minutes that could have been being a professional and running into RAM limits!
Gee, thanks for that knowledge!
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New Mac Pro With M2 Ultra Chip Might Launch This Spring Alongside macOS 13.3
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Sliding off the side off a tower and popping in a stick of RAM takes just 5 minutes, that is 5 minutes that could have been being a professional and running into RAM limits!
Gee, thanks for that knowledge!
Have to concur with this, most of the places I work in are server environments and there are mountains of old RAM sticks around both from upgrades and repairs.
Apple will do it and their consumers will throw money at them for some ridiculous reason. You have to wonder about their IQ when they pay money for such gimped products. Makes zero sense.
that's is an extremely ridiculous statement. Just because you don't need to upgrade doesn't mean others don't. Typically apple over charged for ram, many pro users would buy base ram configs and buy ram somewhere else, or later when it was cheaper. Needs for ram change over time. you pay for a pro system you can afford at the time and save to add ram later. not everyone is rich like you. graphics cards change almost yearly. adding internal expansion cards used to be a thing as well. Adding, networking, ports, audio, further internal drive connectors. It was all a thing at one time. I have G4 quicksilvers running as file servers still, I repurposed them by adding more ram and storage and Sata cards.. if you think it is cool to be locked in to SoC configuration that are designed to make you buy $10,000-20,000 machines every 4 years, you have way too much money to burn. It is embarrassing to have to decide at purchase what exactly all your needs will be for the next 7-8 years. If you cant afford to buy it now, you are too poor? This company is just greed driven now. glue together and force you to buy a new one every other year. All that e-waste. I don't fall for that anymore. 35 years of using Macs and I have never seen it this bad. jobs left a money hungry bozo in charge. There is no reason why machines can't last 10 serviceable years and then be repurposed.
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Apple painted themselves into a corner by not planning their chip roadmap very well. And apparently this has led to firings.
The conversation last summer went like this: “so you are telling me that there is NO WAY to ever add third party GPU or upgradable memory to our SoC design going forward, even for a Mac ***** Pro?! And now your team is stuck and can’t go much further than the original M1 core without heat and power penalties that won’t work in most of our designs?!”
The conversation last summer went like this: “so you are telling me that there is NO WAY to ever add third party GPU or upgradable memory to our SoC design going forward, even for a Mac ***** Pro?! And now your team is stuck and can’t go much further than the original M1 core without heat and power penalties that won’t work in most of our designs?!”
I think they did have it planned well. We were supposed to be done by now. But COVID, chip shortages, Ukraine, shipping issues etc have all had a giant impact on things.
There's no specific use case where an M1 mini isn't enough, but I am hoping the new M2 versions have higher RAM options. And possibly higher end GPU options as well. Since there's no rush, I am willing to wait to find out what specs the next gen mini will offer. That being said, I hope new minis are announced sooner rather than later.What use case are you concerned with where an M1 mini is not enough, the M1 Max Studio is too much, but an M2 mini with a 10% performance increase is what you need?
I’m confused by this. I own a 2019 24-core Mac Pro, and if I could swap out the MPX GPU unit (a W6800X Duo) to put in the new model that would be great. But that appears to run contrary to Apple’s new SoC strategy with built-in graphics processing (and I’ve no idea how it compares to my current setup). Also, unless this thing has multiple M2 chips, will it be significantly more powerful to justify an upgrade? I usually try and double performance (roughly) with each Mac Pro upgrade. Fingers crossed for best of both worlds.
Thank you! I know that Apple in recent years (and several users on this forum) will tell you to just estimate all your needs in advance, but that's not always feasible.
Requiring customers to anticipate their usage for a computer that should last 5-8 years is asinine. New workloads or entirely new types of software could be created over time. But it's part of Apple's upsell - users who are concerned about growing needs are more likely to overbuy to avoid getting "stuck" in the future. Allowing for aftermarket RAM has several obvious benefits for the consumer:
- Allows the user to grow as they need
- Delays the expense of additional RAM from the time of purchase until when you actually need it
- Acknowledges that prices change over time & that extra 64GB of DDR5 (for example) will likely cost less 3 years from now than it does now
- Avoids the outrageous markup for BTO upgrades
I'll add that, while Apple's unified memory architecture (UMA) precludes upgrades, make no mistake that when Apple was developing UMA they were aware that restriction would lead to exactly what you describe, and thus an increase in profit. I.e., UMA gives Apple a technological excuse to extend, to their desktops (whose Intel versions all had upgradeable RAM), a restriction they've previously only had in place only for laptops, and thus profit accordingly.
[I'm not saying UMA doesn't offer performance benefits. Rather I'm just saying Apple isn't exactly unhappy that this also forces its desktop customers to preconfigure their purchases with Apple RAM.]
Having said that, it's pushing it for them to try to use the UMA argument to justify locking a very expensive machine like the Mac Pro into a fixed memory capacity at the time of purchase.
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Upgradable RAM is not just about ugrading RAM later, but also about having the option to buy the RAM somewhere else instead of having to pay the ridiculous prices Apple is asking for more RAM. The main advantage for Apple with its SOC model is locking you even more into the Apple ecosystem. Apple wants to make it as hard as possible for you to buy stuff somewhere else.
That's where I come back to Dell and HP. You can configure a HP Z8 G4 to well over $100,000, if you do it directly via HP. You also have the option though to just buy the base model from HP for just $3,000 or so and then add RAM, graphics cards, storage or even a faster processor on your own. That will save you tens of thousands of dollars for the same maxed out machine. Apple does not give you the option. If Apple decides to charge $1,500 more, if you want 192 GB of RAM instead of 96 GB, you have to pay that price.
That's where I come back to Dell and HP. You can configure a HP Z8 G4 to well over $100,000, if you do it directly via HP. You also have the option though to just buy the base model from HP for just $3,000 or so and then add RAM, graphics cards, storage or even a faster processor on your own. That will save you tens of thousands of dollars for the same maxed out machine. Apple does not give you the option. If Apple decides to charge $1,500 more, if you want 192 GB of RAM instead of 96 GB, you have to pay that price.
Just bring back the 6,1 design, but six inches taller, room for 8 Ultras, 1TB memory, upgrade USBA/TB2 all to USBC/TB4, problem solved.
One part of what you write is correct; i.e. max out a computer to what you are able to afford. Another side of what you write is downright incorrect. From a capital expenditure point of view huge amounts of cash may be saved by having upgradeable machines. Not everyone is a "one man band" organisation. Some are large businesses with lots of computers that would cost a fortune if replaced without carrying out upgrades first. IT department costs are cheap in comparison to purchasing brand new computers every-time they no longer met requirements.
As for smaller one man bands who are only able to afford a certain amount for a computer, but know that they can afford to upgrade over the life time of the computer, what makes them not "professional"? You stating it is so? I do not think so.
You are very spoilt if you get a new Mac every time you get bored with the current one. That is not how most businesses work.
What about somebody who makes their living from photography or videography? Are those people not considered pros? They have to pay for their stuff mostly on their own. So they might want to buy a cheaper machine and then find out if they still need more RAM instead of just proactively buying the most amount of RAM they could possibly need. The same could be true for a single architect who needs a lot of RAM for his 3D design software. Of course software always comes with RAM recommendations, but there still might be reasons to upgrade later. A photographer for example might suddenly buy a 100 megapixel camera, while his old camera only had 30 megapixels. More RAM can help in that situation.
I can imagine, that the Mac mini will be update in every 3 or 4 years. As has been the case in the past (2014, 2018).
I’m a fan of the cluster in an mpx Module idea- maybe you won’t be able to add just ram modules but basically to add an entire cluster of things like gpu+CPU+ram and or as an alternative just gpu+ram.
I could see the Mac Pro be released alongside the mixed reality headset either at wwdc or in march.
I could see the Mac Pro be released alongside the mixed reality headset either at wwdc or in march.
The Mac Pro tower from 2010 (that I'm still using!) has Intel Xeon processors and ECC RAM. Was good when it came out and still runs macOS Monterey and Windows 10 remarkably well (albeit after some hardware upgrades and software tinkering – NVMe drive, PCIe card for USB-C, new graphics card and OpenCore).
I think it warrants its ”pro” name for sure.
This could actually be the only viable concept to deliver a proper workstation, together with Apple's fetishism with SoCs for everything.
Sell a barebones system with 1 M2 Ultra cluster, which could support max 256GB soldered RAM, and option to spec it with more clusters, I suppose you should design it for 4 clusters minimum if you want to get up to 1TB RAM.
Will still make a lot of people mad but at least wouldn't be too much of a laughingstock of a system.
You won’t be able to upgrade the graphics, Apples silicon only uses its own built in GPU, also worth storage, so far it’s been either soldered on the board, or on the case of the Studio locked down so you can only use Apples one storage solutions. So expect to see a machine you can upgrade storage on from Apple only. And that’s it. Everything else will be soldered on the board.
My 2010 Mac Pro's PCIe 2.0 16x slot is already faster than Thunderbolt for storage speeds, with PCIe 4.0 or 5.0, no comparison.
I have a source who’s working on VFX for the presentation of the new Mac Pro and though they were getting different sorts of information this particular concept was definitely in the cards he told one time when he was drunk 😇.