Sonnet's Latest Enclosures Help You Rack Mount Your Mac Studio

[deconstruct60]

Unfortunately not a whole lot of compatibility at this point.

The list need to be taken into context.
1. Cards where there is no Mac compatibility at all . The M-series not working is not 'new'. ( macOS has had very poor coverage for very high end bandwidth Ethernet cards for basically since they crossed the 25Gb/s mark. . )

2. Some cards are old and their drivers are pragmatically abandoned. They happen to work as long as you don't make major changes to the OS kernel. Apple has deprecated kernel extensions before the transition( so on both Intel and M-series side of macOS lines of development). Those drivers will disappear in the future. So even if M and no 'M1' coverage. Those cards a walking zombies. Those not making the transition should not be all that surprising.


Cards that have DriverKit drivers are not going to be a problem. But there are several folks dragging their feet on transition. Sometimes that is because nobody is asking for it. Some vendors have done stop gap kext drivers for M-series and will transition later. Some card folks are looking to just do it once.

Also older cards where no customers are paying for new driver updates. Again shouldn't be a surprise (no pay , no work).

3. Anything that has to do with providing essential services at the very early boot stage is likely going to have problems. GPUs (so can see the screen). Any kind of software RAID and older storage controller that is not covered in the new Boot startup mechanism ( not booting EFI/UEFI with BIOS fallbacks anymore).


4. Anything with bandwidth needs that far outstrips Thunderbolt is probably on a slow boat.

5. Dump the GPU section. (that is actually a "M-seres ecosystem " policy thing )


That said it would probably help if the line up had a Mac where didn't need to buy an TB external enclosure to drive more card sales. More cards sales leads to more driver development funds which leads to keep the list longer on at least new(er) cards.

 

[deconstruct60]

Just bring back the xserve, and the awesome RAID drives, they looked amazing but goodness me they were loud…

As Jobs said "Nobody bought it". The volume is too low. It was exactly zero but if rounded the percentage to the closest whole interger it is zero. (e.g., 0.4% is 0% ).

The 2019 rack is the same board , power supply , fans , and cards as the tower version. Collected into an aggregate they are enough. Separate pretty good chance they fail as viable products.

The XServe is just too far away from a single person, GUI driven personal computer to be in the Mac family. There is no macOS Server version either.

The plain macOS is a good enough server/web services OS. And the plain Macs are good enough servers for lots of jobs. Mini. Mac Pro for jobs that are hosted on macOS.

The space where the XServe was there was lots of pressure to be as equally (or better ) good at Linux, VMWare, and/or Windows. Plus the uptick on pushing virtual machines running anywhere in the server farm. None of that does a whole lo develop the overall Mac ecosystem. ( Apple isn't out to make everything for everybody.)

 

[falkon-engine]

You are presuming that the TBv5 controllers get provisioned more than x4 PCI-e v3 worth of bandwidth. That has nothing to do with the downstream wire being faster. Lots of the SoCs those system controllers are going to be embedded inside of have competing interests for bandwidth.

Pragmatically, a large chunk of that bandwidth increase could be allocated to video. That has happened before in TB bw allocations .

Tb4 already supports 80 gbps of displayport video. The next generation will use PAM3 signaling to double the data rate.

 

[edgefox]

Used the XMACMINI for years and am super stoked about having the xmac studio available.

Some notes based on others comments.

The power button on the xmacmini has always been the weakest link (IMO) this version looks much better and more promising but I won’t be able to get an accurate gauge until I see it in person. (The issue isn’t usually with the pushing of the power button it’s with the releasing of the button)

Being open in the back is actually kinda great for me, the completely enclosed xmacmini made getting Wi-Fi very difficult to the point where I had to incorporate an external antenna.

I’ve used the echo III and now the duo modo, it’s important to note that the duo modo echo III is NOT the same design as the original echo III which was a huge bummer for those of us already invested in the echo system.

I understand the concern about cost but if you use this for work (I have my xmacmini built into a rolling cart that travels all over interiors and exteriors) you’re paying for that robustness.

I have a decklink card and a sas controller card but will probably swap the sas controller out for an m.2 raid card (made by the same company)

I get that this mount is intended for everyone but for those of us that it is intended for it seems pretty great.