M5 is rumored to use a new packaging technique that will feed into both consumer and server usage. Apple can use variations of the server chip for the Mac Pro.
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MP All Models The Mac Pro is Dead, This is the End?
- Thread starter MoonCakeTropics
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I agree with what you’re saying and I absolutely think that macOS should remain a keyboard and mouse first operating system.
But I absolutely do think that their laptops should have touchscreens, if only because it just seems like something so obvious to most consumers these days.
Can’t tell you how many times people have reached up to touch the Mac computers in my home to then be disappointed when absolutely nothing happens.
Even I, someone with both a Mac and an iPad, sometimes get confused and reach up to touch the screen just because it’s at this point in our society, the most intuitive thing to do.
The iPad has keyboard and mouse support, I think the Mac should have touchscreen. Not as the definitive input method, of course, just as an option.
I have mixed feelings on this.
I absolutely do not want a Mac with a touchscreen. If it’s an option, I will not get it. I have a Chromebook with it, and the touchscreen is disabled. I don’t like fingerprints on my computer screens. I know that seems weird because I don’t mind touching a tablet, but something about having fingerprints on the laptop screen bothers me. I have a full keyboard and trackpad, so I don’t find the need or want to touch the screen.
This being said those are only my wants. I know a lot of the younger “What’s a computer?” generation were handed a touchscreen about the time they gave up their pacifier. Not having a touchscreen probably drives them crazy so it’s understandable. Apple is a company that makes products for people that want them so if there’s a group of people out there that want a touchscreen Mac, Apple needs to make it. My only request is make it optional. I like my iPad for touchscreen and my Mac for mouse and keyboard.
I would suggest otherwise. IMO the world's fourth largest computer manufacturer should be investing millions into the top end of its computer technology. Even if that technology is niche in terms of sales volume.
Such work pays dividends all the way down the chain of products. And it also likely enables new product direction and thinking. E.g. lessons were no doubt learned trying to make an Extreme variant work. IMO apple, having stayed involved at the high end, will likely allow them to produce an AI specific platform (perhaps a Mac Pro).
Shocking lack of vision presented here.
Yes, the M2 Mac Pro was an embarrassment. And Apple should have refreshed it once more with updated X86 guts in 2022 so they could run it another 3 years, just in time for its grand makeover again for Apple Silicon when it was truly ready. But I suspect they really felt compelled to stick to their self-imposed roadmap.
It's still possible that they let it die, I suppose. I really hop that's not the case though. I'm hoping we see something roughly like the following:
M5 generation, as mentioned above, ends up being the architecture that really kicks things into high gear, and allows them to take on proper workstation and server-grade workloads. To really drive this home, they will invert the rollout from mobile-first to desktop-first. The most powerful machines will get it first, and then it will roll out to the lower powered machine over time as costs go down.
They will start with an M5 Pro, M5 Max and M5 Ultra Mac Pro at WWDC. Maybe tops out close to 100 CPU cores, and some multiple of that in GPU cores. 2tb of RAM, TB5, etc. The real killer app, however, would be using the "MPX" form factor for expansion modules. Examples might be - just another M5 module, modules devoted to GPU cores, modules devoted to AI/tensor cores, maybe other specialized functions like audio in/out, video capture, etc. Maybe 3rd parties get involved again.
This would almost certainly allow Apple to decisively take back the crown for "most powerful desktop machine on earth" and allow them to compete with Nvidia, Intel and AMD for the most demanding workloads. Something like this would truly change the game and re-invent what a personal computer is capable of, again.
Not sure if anything like this is on the table but if they have any drive and motivation left over there, they will hopefully try something like this. I'd certainly like to see this.
We already know that M5 will form the basis for their in-house servers, to me that makes it the perfect candidate for a product like this. You could end up with a desktop machine that, when fully spec'd out, could go toe-to-toe with GB200. Hundreds of CPU cores, many hundreds of GPU cores, terabytes of memory. The appetite will absolutely exist for machines like this, especially if they are willing to help on the software side.
Yes, the M2 Mac Pro was an embarrassment. And Apple should have refreshed it once more with updated X86 guts in 2022 so they could run it another 3 years, just in time for its grand makeover again for Apple Silicon when it was truly ready. But I suspect they really felt compelled to stick to their self-imposed roadmap.
It's still possible that they let it die, I suppose. I really hop that's not the case though. I'm hoping we see something roughly like the following:
M5 generation, as mentioned above, ends up being the architecture that really kicks things into high gear, and allows them to take on proper workstation and server-grade workloads. To really drive this home, they will invert the rollout from mobile-first to desktop-first. The most powerful machines will get it first, and then it will roll out to the lower powered machine over time as costs go down.
They will start with an M5 Pro, M5 Max and M5 Ultra Mac Pro at WWDC. Maybe tops out close to 100 CPU cores, and some multiple of that in GPU cores. 2tb of RAM, TB5, etc. The real killer app, however, would be using the "MPX" form factor for expansion modules. Examples might be - just another M5 module, modules devoted to GPU cores, modules devoted to AI/tensor cores, maybe other specialized functions like audio in/out, video capture, etc. Maybe 3rd parties get involved again.
This would almost certainly allow Apple to decisively take back the crown for "most powerful desktop machine on earth" and allow them to compete with Nvidia, Intel and AMD for the most demanding workloads. Something like this would truly change the game and re-invent what a personal computer is capable of, again.
Not sure if anything like this is on the table but if they have any drive and motivation left over there, they will hopefully try something like this. I'd certainly like to see this.
We already know that M5 will form the basis for their in-house servers, to me that makes it the perfect candidate for a product like this. You could end up with a desktop machine that, when fully spec'd out, could go toe-to-toe with GB200. Hundreds of CPU cores, many hundreds of GPU cores, terabytes of memory. The appetite will absolutely exist for machines like this, especially if they are willing to help on the software side.
IIRC Apple's share is ~16%. And worldwide computer sales are not exactly chump change; not a small pie.
My point is simply that Apple is big enough to invest in synergizing tech across all its profit centers. Efforts spent on Mac Pros or AVPs may pay off directly or indirectly or sometimes not at all. But they need to go for it.
This is never happening to the level you suggest unless Apple starts investing millions of dollars toward creating and maintaining a Linux distribution for Apple Silicon. Doesn’t seem likely.
M5 may come with the more configurable design but 100 CPU cores without a server OS… no way. There’s no consumer use case for that via current builds of MacOS.
Graphics will probably get an enormous increase though, and hopefully better matrix operations and optionally more neural cores.
If they get the fabric working properly a quad could happen (if it’s not a bespoke design) but the primary benefit outside of more GPU horsepower would be double the addressable memory and bandwidth which is useful for model inference and fine tuning. Still the CPU core count almost certainly would be 48 or less.
Even with parallel workloads there are weird issues when you start getting into those ultra high core count machines, it’s extremely difficult for even well-designed software to take great advantage of it, I’ve worked with some of those machines and the best use case was putting multiple developers on them which MacOS isn’t well equipped for compared to others.
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I've been using Apple products day in, day out for ~31 years now. It's not cynical, it's a reasonable conclusion based upon experience.
If I could get macOS on an iPad, I'd have no reason to buy a Macbook. It's literally the entire pitch for an iPad - that you don't need a "computer" - "what's a computer?" was the marketing line.
macOS has a touchscreen keyboard, and the experience would be identical to using the touchscreen keyboard in iPadOS.
Most people don't even want iPadOS on their iPad. But as usual, Apple's business model, its primary business model, is to shield products from competition (they are, after all, a convicted antitrust violator).
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This is patently false given the majority of iPad owners will be people using it for consumption rather than creation.
Apple's primary business model is consumer electronics. The days of it being some exclusive, professional-based market are over. This however does not mean they should ignore the professional market. It often seems like their focus on iPhone video and Final Cut means they position their top devices at the creator market, rather than the professional creative as they once did.
But does the professional creative market still lean towards Apple products? I'm genuinely curious if anyone can answer that question. Autodesk for example do not even make industry standard software like Revit for the Mac at all and I find the Mac version of AutoCAD to have an awful GUI compared to the Windows version. I work in higher education and we still have Macs in our video editing and photography suites but then my son's college recently binned their iMacs in favour of a PC suite and he studies photography!
Nothing about iPadOS makes it inherently "better" for content consumption than macOS, all we know is that its "popularity" is invalid as a measue, because it's not measured against anything. Its the hardware that makes the iPad popular for consumption.
No, Apple's primary business model is tying services to devices in a way that generates revenue synergies unavailable to competing services and products.
I know in the games studio where my partner works, where they produced games for Apple Arcade, that were funded by Apple directly, the only Macs in the company were a couple of Mac Minis that were used as build servers for Unreal on all the PCs that plugged directly to iOS devices to push to device.
Do you have data to support your claim that most people buying an iPad don't want iPadOS?
In today's Apple lineup there is no room for a new Mac Pro. There is no use case for it to exist. As Steve Jobs said when he announced the iPad, it has to be better at key tasks otherwise it has no reason for being.
And, fortunately for Apple, portable computing is most of what’s sold to consumers. Having 10% share of a huge market is better than having a 10% share of a tiny market.
Hardly. If you're a gamer (and there are many of those), you likely have a tower. What do you think all those nVidia and AMD graphics cards go into? Not mini computers. The form factor is entirely irrelevant when it's sitting under your desk anyway.
Sure, waiting a couple of years for a comparable replacement is not dead. Stagnating for 3-6 years with no updates only to be replaced for an "in name only" device with radically different functionality/form-factor is "dead" for all practical purposes. This has already happened to the Mac Pro 3-4 times.
RIP #1: The original cheesgrater died ~2013 (a year or so earlier in the EU because Apple couldn't be bothered to add a simple fan guard) - the 2013 "Cylinder" was a radically different concept (and not what everybody wanted). It might actually have been better received if it had been sold alongside an up-to-date Mac Pro tower.
RIP #2: The 2013 Cylinder effectively died a few years later after it failed to see any real CPU or GPU upgrades and never got Thunderbolt 3. It was obsolete - unless you were replacing a broken one - by 2017, and a Dead Mac Walking by 2019. The 2019 Mac Pro was, again, nothing like the cylinder it supposedly replaced - it was also quite a departure from the original cheesegrater, particularly in price (starting at 2x the cheesegrater's base price for a config that made little sense unless you were going to spend a few thousand more on upgrades).
RIP #3: The 2019 MP may have technically lasted to 2023, but it already had one foot in the grave since, a few months after it started shipping, Apple announced the forthcoming switch to Apple Silicon. The 2023 MP looks like a Mac Pro but it is really just a Studio Ultra with PCIe slots that no longer take GPUs. It makes (expensive) sense for a niche who need PCIe slots for A/V cards, specialist networking or internal SSDs but it's really not a replacement for, or direct successor to the 2019 MP.
You can get an extra "death" if you believe that the iMac Pro was really the "new Mac Pro" intended to replace the trashcan in 2017 (the timing works - right down to the famous U-turn in spring 2017 just about when key partners/developers would have been given a sneak peak of the iMac Pro) - and of course the iMac Pro was a one-and-done that hung around for 4 years without an update while the regular iMac ended up with faster processors...
RIP #4?: We won't know for sure for a while but the current Mac Pro is now 2 processor generations out of date - and lacks things like hardware ray tracing. Maybe there will be a M3 Ultra version - maybe there won't and Apple will declare that a Studio Ultra with 5 TB5 ports that now support PCIev4 finally removes the need for a Mac With Slots.
Thing is "real professional users" may not be so concerned about upgrading to the latest, shiniest Mac every year - but they do buy replacement machines, they do have to kit out new staff, they do have "optimal" times to buy new equipment (when leases expire, or when tax has been fully reclaimed) and they do have to plan and cost years-long projects (which may be in negotiation hell for months). It's not a good look for Apple if, when you need to buy a new Mac Pro this month and find the current model is still using ancient technology or Apple have gone "Oh! Look! Aeroplane!!!" and replaced the Mac Pro you planned for with something that needs a complete workflow re-think.
Apple have a $20 cleaning cloth for that
Seriously, though, I don't think just slapping a touchscreen onto a MacBook is going to be useful - an iMac or Studio Display even less so - because "gorilla arms". It would have to be some sort of 2-in-1 "convertible" design with "tablet" or "easel" mode. Apple should really have stolen the idea of the MS Surface Studio (...a bit of a flop, but then MS knobbled it with absolutely pathetic specs for the price). Also, I think some people don't appreciate the different "design affordances" of mouse+pointer vs. touchscreen UIs.
One big advantage would be the ability to run more iOS/iPadOS apps - MacOS already can run iOS Apps but it relies on publishers enabling the option. I suspect that, in some cases, the user exprience of trying to use an app designed for touch with a mouse would be a bit rubbish.
I have two 😂Apple have a $20 cleaning cloth for that
I’ve never been a fan of those convertible, two in one computers. They seem like they make a mediocre tablet and a mediocre laptop. You end up with a keyboard on the back of your tablet and then if it’s a laptop, it’s not going to have a proper hinge that holds it perfectly still. At least that’s my experience, which is very limited because I avoid them. Maybe if Apple could figure some fancy way where the keyboard would retract in tablet mode, that would be good
I think many developers don’t enable this because it would change the experience in the app. If it’s a game, it could give an unfair advantage. Even in a single player game, it would make it harder for the developer to extract micro transactions from the player.
I don’t see the advantage of having an iPad built into my MacBook or vice versa. I guess if I was traveling around the world and only allowed to have one small carry on then sure it might be useful to have the Swiss Army knife of computers. As it is both easily fit into my bag so when I do travel, it’s not a big deal to put both in there.
If Apple could somehow make it happen without any compromises then why not lets do it but I’ve never seen that done.
They do. And I agree it can pay off to invest in more “exploratory” technology p.
But bringing that to marketability - i.e. taking a design, optimising, verifying, testing and shipping it - every year isn’t necessarily a wise move.
Really? "Most people"?
What's your basis for this assertion? I can honestly say I've never met anybody who has said "I want an iPad but I really don't want to have to run iPadOS on it".
This seems the most obvious choice to me, if not an optional hardware feature, then definitely an optional software feature.
Show me the numbers.
The last public analysis of computer sales was from about two years ago, and all four companies were pretty close as to market share.
And, if one only looked at laptops, then Apple is the leader.
HP and Lenovo sells boatloads of boxes to big companies, to sit on desks of people who have no choice in the matter.
The future of Intel is being debated even now. Rumors of Broadcom wanting to buy part of it continue to be pushed. But, Broadcom doesn't want the fab part of Intel.
AMD, like Apple and Nvidia, depends upon contracting with fabs, but TSMC pretty much dominates that space now, for the cutting edge.
The industry has spent 40 years trying to patch over the old IBM PC AT architecture. Sure, it's evolved but as others in this thread have noted the smartphone is what the masses want.
The server market is not Apple's thing. If it were then Apple would have continued with the Xserve.
If Apple is designing their own servers for AI farms then perhaps it might repackage such and sell a server to others. Or maybe not. Only the future knows.
I'd like a Mac with lots of RAM, to play to my current interests in LLMs and other AI. Such a thing does not look to be coming, though. And yes, the 2019 Mac Pro can take a lot of RAM but it's pretty slow compared to Apple Silicon.