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What to Expect From Apple This Spring: New Macs and More

Alan Wynn said:
Do you have some evidence that:
  1. They sold a significant number of those machines (or any of the previous pro desktop systems)?
  2. 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?
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2: The Onus is on you to prove that less than 1 percent ‘tinker’ upgrade their workstations (your claim completely belies the fact that almost all workstations come with ‘expansion’ slots)

1: Do you have evidence that Apple sold more thrashcans per year than the standard Mac pros with slots?
Why did the likes of HP make fun of the tcMP IF that was the form factor that would work best ?
Why didn’t HP, Dell the entire workstation market move to non’tinkertable’ form factors (far larger than the Mac Pro market BTW)
Why did Apple release the 2019 Mac Pro ?
Certainly it has more data than you viz how users use the workstations.

I have been in CG for last two decades, freelance and working . I don’t know if that qualifies as a ‘real’ pro in your personal dictionary.

I bought a PC workstation in 2018, fed up with Apple dragging its feet (I skipped the tcMP. Before that I had Mac pros both bought by myself and supplied by the studios)

I upgraded late last year from an 18 core, 128 GB, 3 x GPUs to a 32 core, 256 GB system (kept the GPUs because collectively they hold their own against a 4090)
SSD, HDDs get swapped/upgraded every now and then.

Didn’t buy the 2019
- Price to performance is underwhelming.
- Came too late in the upgrade cycle.

I have seen and used systems that were upgraded as and when needed.
 
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Alan Wynn said:
  1. They sold a significant number of those machines (or any of the previous pro desktop systems)?
  2. 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?
Even if 10% of users added a card, that is still likely fewer than 20,000 people.

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
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Workstations in this category are often treated by companies that buy them as capital assets in the same class as, say, a truck, instead of a general developer laptop, and get service cycles where they are often upgraded in addition to replacement cycles. They tend to stay with devs, designers, etc who's using them for at least 2 standard replacement cycles. Source: lots of experience in the tech industry across several sectors.

If your bf is an individual owning the machine above doesnt apply to him and he probably hasnt encountered it. I will say individuals that own such machines, including me even before upgrading my 2010 and newer 2013 (personal machines) was basically a hobby (for personal use I stopped needing that kind of power on my desk, the 2013 and my m1 mini are fine, so no need to spend on something like a 2019, maybe I'll get a studio at some point), tend to upgrade them even more than companies - it sounds like your bf simply isnt pushing the limits of the machine they have.

Workwise I would be pushing the limits of a 2019 now. If I had a 2019 as my work machine and didnt have the heavy lifting remote I'd probably be getting IT to upgrade it about now, as it is my MBP works fine because my heavy lifting is done on remote boxes that far outstrip the MP - but that's the other end of things, overkill for a lot of folks.
 
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CarAnalogy said:
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.
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It would have to be like a dual M3X/Ultra setup in my thinking. Basically a quad M3Max with "external" graphics and RAM and drives.
 
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I am ready for a new Ultra 2 iWatch! Apple please bring it stores in Spring and not in the Fall!:)
 
BringBackTheNewton said:
Because there's nothing Apple can do to make it shine


In the past they'd put a really powerful CPU in it and take advantage of Intel's high end lines. Since they make their own silicon there's nothing they can do to make it impressive
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Or they could release a Mac whose raw computing power dwarfs everything on the market.
 
_Spinn_ said:
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.
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ChatGPT, Google Bard and MS Bing are all on the generative AI bandwagon. Guess what? Generative AI is absolute trash. It has a wow factor, but look beneath the shiny surface and you’ll see the answers themselves are downright pathetic. Siri dwarfs them all in the only thing that matters, accuracy.
 
This is interesting against some future Mac Pro

appleinsider.com

Future Mac Pro may use Apple Silicon & PCI-E GPUs in parallel | AppleInsider

Despite Apple Silicon currently working solely with its own on-board GPU cores, Apple is researching how to support more options, like PCI-E GPUs, all working in tandem.
appleinsider.com appleinsider.com

So Apple's patent applications cover physically supporting two or more graphics cards, then determining which is the best for a particular task. The patent applications then describe how work can be divided across the available GPUs.

That leaves getting back the data from GPU, and that comes over the more general patent application called, "Software Control Techniques For Graphics Hardware That Supports Logical Slots."

This patent application includes descriptions of how control "circuitry may determine mappings between logical slots and distributed hardware slots for different sets of graphics work."

"Various mapping aspects may be software-controlled," it says. "For example, software may specify one or more of the following: priority information for a set of graphics work, to retain the mapping after completion of the work, a distribution rule, a target group of sub-units, a sub-unit mask, a scheduling policy, to reclaim hardware slots from another logical slot, etc."
 
Realityck said:
This is interesting against some future Mac Pro

appleinsider.com

Future Mac Pro may use Apple Silicon & PCI-E GPUs in parallel | AppleInsider

Despite Apple Silicon currently working solely with its own on-board GPU cores, Apple is researching how to support more options, like PCI-E GPUs, all working in tandem.
appleinsider.com appleinsider.com

So Apple's patent applications cover physically supporting two or more graphics cards, then determining which is the best for a particular task. The patent applications then describe how work can be divided across the available GPUs.

That leaves getting back the data from GPU, and that comes over the more general patent application called, "Software Control Techniques For Graphics Hardware That Supports Logical Slots."

This patent application includes descriptions of how control "circuitry may determine mappings between logical slots and distributed hardware slots for different sets of graphics work."

"Various mapping aspects may be software-controlled," it says. "For example, software may specify one or more of the following: priority information for a set of graphics work, to retain the mapping after completion of the work, a distribution rule, a target group of sub-units, a sub-unit mask, a scheduling policy, to reclaim hardware slots from another logical slot, etc."
Click to expand...

To my layman mind, this seems to be an indicator that we may see ASi GPGPUs as an option for more compute/render horsepower in the forthcoming ASi Mac Pro, and we could also see Apple offering these ASi GPGPUs in external housings, meaning e(GP)GPUs for the slotless ASi Macs...

But I would think initial launch would keep the ASi GPGPUs to the ASi Mac Pro, supply constraints and all that...?
 
Alan Wynn said:
Just to clarify, you are upset at Apple because you have decided that a random poster on Mac Rumors said that Apple will not update the Mac studio until some future release of some currently unannounced machine.

Got it.
Click to expand...
I'm not upset at Apple based on forum conjecture. Glad I could clarify!
 
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