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What to Expect From Apple This Spring: New Macs and More
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To whoever this applies to, I promise you didn't miss anything.
Oh, okay. My mistake.
It “applies to” exactly who I said. Folks who weren’t alive, or into this stuff, and whose only experience with an Apple presentation or keynote being after Steve was no longer doing them.
Was that not super clear?
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That would be an instant buy for me 😂
Even with the 15 coming out in some months.
Might work for one cycle, then the new Mac Pro will need PCIe 5.0 slots and that would not work.
Within a generation, that would be possible, not much more than that, though.
Those would be sold for one or two cycles and then it would only be the used market.
Not if you wanted to be on the current hardware. The PCIe bus changes alone would prevent that.
The reality is that people do not update their machines. Every company that has ever made systems like this (CPU on a replaceable card) discovered it was not really worth it.
I think I would have liked that test better if he had a W6900X in that Mac Pro. Mac Pro with W6800X Duo (or 2 of them) will totally wipe the floor of any Apple Silicon machine to date in 3D GPU Rendering.
The only compelling thing about Apple Silicon is the performance per watt and the incredibly good video encode/decode hardware. The fast RAM is great also, but a professional workstation needs to be upgradeable. That's probably the first thing most people do. It wasn't for me until it started to become a problem; my first upgrade was going from the 580x to a W6800X Duo. I knew the W6000 series were around the corner so I limped along with the 580x for a bit.
someone’s forgetting about the Cube, the direct predecessor to the trashcan Mac Pro and the current Mac Studio.
Apple’s been trying to make fancy main machines for years.
Multiply that by 4 and you’re getting closer… this is without the wheels or afterburner card because I’m not sure that counts as maxing out
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That is the result of positioning the Mac Pro as an on-again/off-again halo product priced beyond what mainstream buyers can afford. Give users what they have been asking for (mid-range/expandable), give it regular updates and stick with it long enough to re-establish credibility and it will sell well.
I didn’t “forget” about anything. What part of “workhorse professional towers” was I not clear about?
The G4 Cube wasn’t a “pro tower”, and I was already specifically talking about/referencing the trashcan and I see the Mac Studio as a taller, beefier Mac mini. I think most do, vs. a “pro tower” with all the expansion options we associate with that design (the G3, G4, G5 and pre-trashcan offerings that sold well and that I saw/used in various jobs during their run).
While anecdotal, it’s a fact I’ve never seen a trash can Mac in real life, ever (and I know a lot of Mac users and Mac-based outfits, production departments, etc.), and only one current Mac Pro (and he wishes he’d just bought a 16” MacBook Pro instead).
The Cube was never positioned/sold as a replacement to the G4 tower; those models continued, outlasting the Cube. The Cube was a pricey boutique “style” experiment, probably ahead of its time. Apparently so was the trashcan, as it languished, untouched, for about six years.
I was very clear in my post exactly what I was talking about - their workhorse, professional towers - and was already pointing out the issues with the trashcan and current model (the wheels and display stand silliness).
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I doubt many people buy RAM from Apple since their prices are so inflated. I know I didn't.
I thought the Cube was cool, but just like the trashcan; not practical to the audience they were trying to serve. I basically did a Hackintosh between my G5 tower and the 2019 tower. The hackintosh is now my windows gaming tower.
Possibly, although I'm not sure expandability is really very important to the vast majority of users these days. The days of a big box with slots seems like ancient history to me. I would wager that 95% or more of Apple's customers don't care about expandability or upgradeability.
Mac Pro should be discontinued now...it's weird to see Apple squirming so much trying to figure out how to release it where it still has relevance. The design serves so many purposes that are no longer issues.
I’m excited to see the new Mac Pro. Though I expect I might be disappointed.
The rumored eye tracking on the AR/VR headset just sounds creepy. If Apple were to combine it with an actual AI (like ChatGPT and not Siri) it would be able to know you better than you do. I do wonder what their AI meeting is going to be about. They are currently way behind ChatGPT, Google, and Microsoft with AI.
The rumored eye tracking on the AR/VR headset just sounds creepy. If Apple were to combine it with an actual AI (like ChatGPT and not Siri) it would be able to know you better than you do. I do wonder what their AI meeting is going to be about. They are currently way behind ChatGPT, Google, and Microsoft with AI.
Why do you think that "mainstream" buyers have any interest in a product like it?
What evidence do you have that "users have been asking for" anything like it? Even when they Mac Pro (and before that the G5/G4 Powermacs) were much cheaper, they were a small percentage of Apple's sales and almost no one ever upgraded them. A small number of non-pro tinkerers added memory later, a much smaller number upgraded the GPU (or as we called them then "graphics cards").
Apple has said that fewer than 1% of those systems every had a card added. Tinkerers want that option, but real professionals almost never bother. After the machine has been depreciated and there are things in the workflow that would benefit from a faster/better system, they upgrade the whole machine.
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I was thinking that they never launch hardware at WWDC but you make a good point about a new OS. Show the product and then do a series of software events during WWDC with the developers.
Speak for yourself. Rest of us don’t need certificates.
Funny but that’s exactly what apple did with the 2019 mp. Perhaps it should have been called Mac non-real Pro.
I hope there is a new iPhone 14 pro colour and that it makes up for the lack of masculine colours available for it now. The only reason I haven’t bought one yet is because I don’t want another black phone and I know they can do a lot better like they did with the green 13 pro. Let’s see another green one this year or even better, brown would be dope!
My personal rumor: there will be two MacPro: the first will be essentially a Mac Studio plus some PCI slot (3 ?), but not intended for GPU. GPU and RAM will be the standard one, SSD will be the standard ones, but the slots will allows to add SSDs, other kind of ports and other specific cards. This one will *not* have the same form factor of the last mac pro. May be it will not even be called Mac Pro, but it is the machine the latest rumors are talking about (note that the rumors about a Mac Pro without external GPU and RAM but with the same form factor make absolutely no sense, the whole Mac Pro case was designed to assure good thermals to the external GPUs). This Mac will not substitute the Intel MacPro that will be around for some more time. The second will be a very high end machine, that will substitute the Intel MacPro. Maybe.
Never said anything about certificates. I am speaking from my experience working many visual effects houses and post production facilities. People do not want an unsupported machines and have realized that it is rarely worth upgrading in pieces.
Apple made a machine that had PCIe slots (for the small number of users that needed them for something other than GPUs - again according to Apple’s number less than 1% of users do that) and supported lots of ECC RAM. It was delivered at a price point that made it too expensive for most people who were not using it to make money. (Go back and look at the complaints on here about it.)
Do you have some evidence that:
- They sold a significant number of those machines (or any of the previous pro desktop systems)?
- That more than 1% of the tiny number of people that bought them added cards, replaced the GPU or added RAM over the life of the machine?
Do you own a 2019 Mac Pro? Did you buy it new? What upgrades have you done on it? Do you use it for your work? What do you do?
My BF purchased his machine with 96GB of RAM, a Radeon Pro Duo and an Afterburner card in January of 2020. He bought an OWC Accelsior 8m2 in which he has 16TB of NVMe storage. That is the only thing he as done to the machine in the three years since he bought it.
This year he will either upgrade to a new Apple Silicon Mac Pro or maybe get a Mac Studio
Yeah I completely forgot about the bump in RAM, HDD, and graphics options. Fully spec'd out it's $52,348
Which, honestly, is the options they need to continue if they wish it to be a professional use machine. We'll need an M3X that offloads RAM and other controllers for expansion. Won't make much sense to purchase a machine with soldered on RAM and then your use-case changes and you can't use your machine anymore because you can't upgrade.
That’s the thing, I don’t see how Apple can possibly top the amount of power the top or even mid range of the current Mac Pro. For every other product line the M series makes sense. But the Mac Pro has the opposite set of priorities.