New Mac Studio and Mac Pro Support Up to Eight 4K Displays, Mac Pro Works With These PCI Cards

[Scott6666]

Priced out a basic studio rig to replace my aging 27” iMac. Came out to $4,850 before tax. This is insane. I paid about $2,000 for the iMac, maybe less.

Apple has an incredible gap in their lineup without a 27” or 32” iMac.

People should not complain about the price of Apple Vision seeing cases like this. The Apple laptops are fairly priced. The desktops, no.

 

[antnythr]

New Mac Studio and Mac Pro Support Up to Eight 4K Displays

That’s great, let me know when MacOS starts supporting 4K displays

 

[EugW]

Priced out a basic studio rig to replace my aging 27” iMac. Came out to $4,850 before tax. This is insane. I paid about $2,000 for the iMac, maybe less.

Apple has an incredible gap in their lineup without a 27” or 32” iMac.

People should not complain about the price of Apple Vision seeing cases like this. The Apple laptops are fairly priced. The desktops, no.

I think the desktops are mostly priced OK. The problem is the pricing of the Apple displays, esp. after you add in the prices of the stands.

 

[zapmymac]

In 2023, all Mac's should support 1 4k @120. The 60 limit is stupid.

 

[jtrenthacker]

I like how they threw in those 1990's speakers to balance out the look

Those look to be high end Genelec powered monitors. About $1000 a pair to start.

 

[orbital~debris]

In a pair of support documents, Apple has listed various external display combinations that can be used with the new Mac Studio and Mac Pro. For example, both Macs support up to eight 4K displays at 60Hz when configured with the M2 Ultra chip.

Article Link: New Mac Studio and Mac Pro Support Up to Eight 4K Displays

MacRumors phoning it in here with this post's photo 👆
🙄
If you're gonna write about supporting up to eight 4K displays, then show us eight 4K displays!

 

[cmcbhi]

Is there ANY reason, other than Apple's sheer bloody minded refusal, that software could not be developed to allow M2 Studio to drive/use my 27" iMac as it's display?
It's an excellent screen, fully as good as the Studio display and I already have it.

 

[EugW]

Is there ANY reason, other than Apple's sheer bloody minded refusal, that software could not be developed to allow M2 Studio to drive/use my 27" iMac as it's display?
It's an excellent screen, fully as good as the Studio display and I already have it.

My 27" iMac can be used as a Mac display, even with a Ventura Mac. It even supports audio output from the Mac.

However, that's because it's a non-Retina 2010 model. I'm not sure which iMac you have but any 5K iMac would require a software workaround that would have problems. I suspect major factors for the Retina models are speed, quality, stability, and the physical connection.

You can use AirPlay, but it would suck. There are third party solutions like Luna Display but they can be laggy and unstable. Given the issues with Sidecar on the iPad, I'm not surprised they decided against trying to do something similar with Retina iMacs. I sometimes used Sidecar to use my iPad Pro 10.5" as a secondary monitor for my 12" MacBook, but it was simply unreliable.

 

[SpringKid]

I like how they threw in those 1990's speakers to balance out the look

Those speakers look exactly like the very popular Genelec G Two, although there’s no Genelec logo. And the led is on the wrong side…

 

[magbarn]

Those are Genelecs (from Finland), great speakers: https://www.genelec.com/g-series

Wow and I thought Sonos was overpriced.

 

[Born Again]

Me.

Show me.

 

[SpringKid]

Wow and I thought Sonos was overpriced.

Not even close to be comparable.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

Priced out a basic studio rig to replace my aging 27” iMac. Came out to $4,850 before tax. This is insane. I paid about $2,000 for the iMac, maybe less.

Apple has an incredible gap in their lineup without a 27” or 32” iMac.

People should not complain about the price of Apple Vision seeing cases like this. The Apple laptops are fairly priced. The desktops, no.

I have zero expectations of the "starting at..." < $2K iMac Bigger ever coming back. I do think one will be revived... but branded PRO and priced like the former iMac Pros.

You might want to look at a Mac Mini or Mini Pro setup and NOT make your monitor selection be limited to only Apple monitors. Prior to Studio Display, Apple "endorsed" the LG 27" as THE monitor pushed in their own stores. It's not like that became "junk" on the launch of SD. Our biased minds here simply re-positioned it that way because now Apple had one to compete... like how Spotify became "terrible" on the launch of Apple music and Google maps became awful on the launch of Apple Maps.

A good 5K LG refurb can be had for < $700-$800. Mac Mini with M2 refurb starts at $509 (refurb store) or PRO starts at $1109 (refurb). That can get you a <$2K whole Mac desktop with the latest M2 Silicon.

If you are willing to go 4K monitor- which is nowhere near as bad as spun in comments around here (just hook an existing Mac to a 4K TV or projector to see how good 4K can be)- 4K monitors are much more abundant and thus much more price competitive. We Apple people position the monitor makers as being at fault on this topic but it's actually macOS' lack of scalability to ANY resolution at fault. Windows has no trouble scaling to any resolution but Macs are finicky, needing oddball re$olution$ for $ome rea$on.

 

[dopeytree]

By the way there is no list of compatible PCI cards.

The apple link just says many cards are compatible:

Other third-party PCIe cards​

You can install many different PCIe cards in your Mac Pro, such as fibre channel cards, fiber networking cards, video and audio I/O cards, storage cards, and ethernet cards. After you install a PCIe card, check with the card's manufacturer to see if you need to install a driver in macOS to enable full functionality of your card.

 

[The Cappy]

Crap. So odds of them making an M2 Max MBA are... 🤪

It was always zero. Same for M2 Pro. The thermals wouldn't permit it. People already complained that the M2 ran a little warmer in the 13" MBA than the M1 had.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

Is there ANY reason, other than Apple's sheer bloody minded refusal, that software could not be developed to allow M2 Studio to drive/use my 27" iMac as it's display?
It's an excellent screen, fully as good as the Studio display and I already have it.

Apple can't make more money that way.

Circa 2010 or so, iMac 27" came with display port and Target Display Mode so they could be used exactly as you wish. Now it requires a fairly onerous hack to get inside and repurpose it to work that way. Most people are not able or afraid to try that conversion. And Apple wants fresh cash. 💰💰

 

[The Cappy]

I have zero expectations of the "starting at..." < $2K iMac Bigger ever coming back. I do think one will be revived... but branded PRO and priced like the former iMac Pros.

You might want to look at a Mac Mini or Mini Pro setup and NOT make your monitor selection be limited to only Apple monitors. Prior to Studio Display, Apple "endorsed" the LG 27" as THE monitor pushed in their own stores. It's not like that became "junk" on the launch of SD. Our biased minds here simply re-positioned it that way because now Apple had one to compete... like how Spotify became "terrible" on the launch of Apple music and Google maps became awful on the launch of Apple Maps.

A good 5K LG refurb can be had for < $700-$800. Mac Mini with M2 refurb starts at $509 (refurb store) or PRO starts at $1109 (refurb). That can get you a <$2K whole Mac desktop with the latest M2 Silicon.

If you are willing to go 4K monitor- which is nowhere near as bad as spun in comments around here (just hook an existing Mac to a 4K TV or projector to see how good 4K can be)- 4K monitors are much more abundant and thus much more price competitive.

It's a little frustrating to me when pundits talk like the 27" iMac no longer makes sense because you could just... get this setup that's more cluttered and costs more and just doesn't appear to the people who wanted an iMac. I wonder, though, if one of the concerns isn't with the thinness of the current iMac. They might feel they'd have to make the whole machine thicker.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

I was a LONG-TERM iMac 27" user myself, thinking it best possible Mac. I do think an iMac "Bigger" makes perfect sense in the lineup. However, Apple Inc. is focused on "another record quarter or revenue & profit" more than ever and I suspect what temporarily killed it was that the relative "bargain" that it was no longer could yield the target margin Apple now wants.

So kill it for a while, establish the same monitor alone at the old "starting at..." price for iMac 27" and then- when Apple adds the whole computer + keyboard + mouse back into that package, the new "starting at..." logically makes some sense up near about 2X the old "starting at" price. To seal that, brand it PRO too, which already set a pricing precedent up ABOVE the 2X pricing level. Then revive it at the much higher price and Apple gets its target margin and probably "then some."

This arms the cheerleaders with dual points to help the corp rationalize 2X:

• SD alone is about $2K and Apple has added a whole Mx-based Silicon computer + keyboard + mouse to the package AND
• Just look at the former, slow, pitiful, requires-Nuclear-Reactor Intel iMac Pro pricing to see what a bargain this one is.

If you checked the teardown of Studio Display, one observation was that there was plenty of room for the iMac computing guts in there. So apparently, it was intended to be an iMac 27" replacement that- at some point- got repurposed as Studio Display... just leaving the whole iMac 27" price as if the computer was still in there.

I suspect when it is resurrected, it will probably look much like SD if not exactly like SD... except in pricing where it will take the great (profitable) leap forward.

 

[db604e]

Except with 8 screens, you'd have a hole in the middle

No no no, with 8 you slide that top one down so you have a notch at the top.

 

[mytdave]

Apple's M-series architecture is really amazing and runs circles around most everything else out there, but there are currently some real limitations. For the vast majority of desktop PC use cases, Apple Silicon is not only adequate, but superior.

However, with the current Mac architecture, there are things that Macs are no longer able to do. The first obvious one is the inability to run x86 operating systems. We have several Macs at the office, but they are not running MacOS. That era is now over, and unfortunately when it comes time to replace them, we're going to have to buy Intel PCs from Dell or HP.

Another limitation of the new Mac architecture is the inability to work with very large programmatic or analytical data sets. 192GB of RAM sounds like a lot, and it is for typical desktop PC applications, including Audio & Video, but it is wholly inadequate for massive data models. Again, at the office we have "workstation" PCs (or servers, i.e. HP Z or DL series) with Intel Xeon processors and between 768GB and 1TB of RAM installed, and our engineers use every drop of that available memory.

There are many other limitations, but the last one I'll mention is the lack of support for GPU cards. I understand why, but I'm hoping Apple will be able to architect a way to extend off-die GPU processing into the M-series silicon. GPU cards don't exist solely to drive monitors. Again, at the office, engineers are working with large data sets that process much faster on GPUs. NVidia still holds the crown when it comes to GPU processing (yes, with high power consumption) and sometimes you just need raw horsepower to accomplish what you need to do.

We have machines with between 4 to 8 high end GPUs and over 1TB of RAM in order to run complex simulations, develop machine learning tools, and now AI type work. That is no longer possible on the Mac platform. The previous Mac Pro was the only machine Apple had which could allow this type of work, but now Apple won't have a presence in this space - not that they had much of a presence before, but at least previously it was technically possible. No more.

 

[SpotOnT]

Still waiting for a 5k 120hz display….

 

[RandomTox]

exciting and what happened to iMac? anyone? higher profit margins on macstudio?

 

[SpotOnT]

Priced out a basic studio rig to replace my aging 27” iMac. Came out to $4,850 before tax. This is insane. I paid about $2,000 for the iMac, maybe less.

Apple has an incredible gap in their lineup without a 27” or 32” iMac.

People should not complain about the price of Apple Vision seeing cases like this. The Apple laptops are fairly priced. The desktops, no.

The Mac Studio + Studio Display is a replacement for the 27” iMac Pro…which had a starting price of 5,000 USD.

The 27” inch standard iMac replacement is a M2 Mac Mini + Studio Display. That gets you back to around your 2,000 USD you expect for a standard 27” iMac.

 

[ectoplasmosis]

Show me.

Most projects we work on are under NDA, but it’s not difficult to imagine a Mac Studio connected via Thunderbolt to HDMI/DP adapters to 6x/7x simultaneous 4K60 inputs on Barco E2, Novastar MCTRL4K, Lightware MX2 matrix etc.

Just because you can’t envisage a usage scenario, doesn’t mean there aren’t real-world cases for such.

 

[therunningman]

Apple would prefer if you were running a wall of Pro Display XDRs.

With the $1000 stands...