Will Mac Studio replace the Mac Pro?

[Apple Knowledge Navigator]

With the recent news from Gurman that the Mac Pro may be on its last legs (according to what he’s heard from inside the company), I thought it might be interesting to speculate on how the Studio will fit into Apple’s future plans.

If the Mac Pro is retired, do you believe we will see a new Studio design? Or will it be a straight-up replacement for the Pro?

 

[mcnallym]

Anyone that put there head on rather then the heart could see when the Studio launched where Apple going with the product.

One of the biggest problems that the Mac Pro faced was that when you look at the consumer Mac's ie mini, iMac, even the MBP then if you look to the 2006-2012 era then there was a jump from what could get inside those boxes compared to the Mac Pro.

I had a 2008 MBP and 2009 Mini. I bought a second hand MP2010 in 2013 and upgraded to a GTX680/W3680 which was a large jump up from those boxes.

A lot of those single cpu 2006-2012 sales moved to iMac, not even the iMac Pro as no need to be buying the Mac Pro any more. The one I had bought was a 2.8 Quad with a 5750 Card and single WD HDD in it.

With the 2020 iMac then could get a 10 Core i9 with 128Gb RAM with 5700XT Pro 16Gb VRAM. So unless buying a high end Mac Pro then didn't really make too much sense anymore.

Wether Pro's like to acknowledge it or not then the sales of those entry level single CPU Mac Pro helped spread the cost of the Mac Pro model over a larger base.

A bit like how before iGPU got usable for the mass then whilst the Nvidia x800 series had the headline performance and high price, then the x200, x400 snapped up by OEM and event the x600 series were where Nvidia made its real money.

Apple even hinted at it when had the round of briefings where acknowledging the 2013 was a dead end as amazed at what people achieving with non Mac Pro machines now.

With the Mac Pro 2019 then a glimmer of hope however with the raft of abandment by YouTubers (hardly the intended market but they felt they needed them) then showed that in effect with the move to Apple Silicon then for a LARGE part but not all then the original 2006-2012 purchasers now could easily just use the Apple Silicon Mac especially once the Studio launched. Especially if had bought single socket machines.

Even with the 2019 then people relying on Nvidia GPU SHOULD have seen the writing on the Wall and started planning transition to alternative platform.

Whilst I bought a Studio with the M1 Generation then was as the M1 Mini had no Pro Chip so no ProRes Encode/Decode which use with FCP X. I full expect next Mac to be a Mini.

I do the work on SSD in a TB3 Sonnet Enclosure and finished stuff moves to a NAS. I don't need TB of SSD of processed files in a single Tower.

In much the same way that even the Custom Games PC gone from the large cases ( I remember building one in a Lian Li 343 Dual Chamber box with dual PSU, Water Cooling etc then much of that has gone to micro-ATX or even ITX boards as can now get performance out of smaller boxes.

USERS don't care if the machine is expandable, upgradeable , how long will last etc. The USER cares, does it allow me to get the tasks done that ask of it.

The person doing the PURCHASING cares about how long will last, if is expandable, upgradable etc. However quite often on MacRumors then PURCHASER and USER are the SAME person.

For example the USER in me would really like to move from a Dell U2724D to a new LG 6K 32" screen. However when the PURCHASER in me asks do you really need it as a lot of money, then have to admit I can do what need to with the Dell. So the PURCHASER tells USER cannot have it.

As such no need to change the design. Have Rack Designs now for Mac Studio so expect to see the Mac Studio like the Mini did for ages keep same external shape for a while now.

 

[maflynn]

If the Mac Pro is retired, do you believe we will see a new Studio design? Or will it be a straight-up replacement for the Pro?

Ths studio was already the MacPro's replacement. It generally does everything the Mac Pro does for a fraction of the price.

People who needed desktop performance on the mac have been choosing the studio over the mac pro. There may be some extremely niche needs that the mac pro can meet, over the studio, but I sumise that a threadripper based PC can do that for less then what apple charges, so again the mac pro loses.

Overall the Mac Pro is a failed design, when apple went with their apple silicon design, they doomed the mac pro to the trash heap. The advantages of the mac pro were designed out of the apple silicon.

 

[Pezimak]

Ths studio was already the MacPro's replacement. It generally does everything the Mac Pro does for a fraction of the price.

People who needed desktop performance on the mac have been choosing the studio over the mac pro. There may be some extremely niche needs that the mac pro can meet, over the studio, but I sumise that a threadripper based PC can do that for less then what apple charges, so again the mac pro loses.

Overall the Mac Pro is a failed design, when apple went with their apple silicon design, they doomed the mac pro to the trash heap. The advantages of the mac pro were designed out of the apple silicon.

Yes, with the change to Apple silicon they turned the Mac Pro from the ultimate upgradable power house Mac, to a large useless box with expansion slots for storage solutions or the odd pro audio card... If they even kept user upgradable memory it could serve as a purpose for Ai as users could upgrade that as they went. Well at least the 2019 and the OG cheese grater will live on with enthusiasts, to be fair the 2019 model can be configured to be quite the beast really, the last upgradable Mac.

 

[MarkC426]

Every article regarding Mac updates always looks the same these days (no Mac Pro shown) which says it all really

 

[JouniS]

Ths studio was already the MacPro's replacement. It generally does everything the Mac Pro does for a fraction of the price.

It's maybe an 80% replacement. The main issue is the lack of internal expansion capacity. Or in other words, the design itself is poor, because it can easily turn your desk into an unholy mess of cables and peripherals.

I would like to see a Mac Studio redesign with some features from the Framework Desktop. A small form factor workstation with an option to replace some Thunderbolt ports with NVMe slots or faster Ethernet, or something like that.

 

[Daydog]

OH NO NOT smaller please😡😱

 

[maflynn]

It's maybe an 80% replacement. The main issue is the lack of internal expansion capacity. Or in other words, the design itself is poor, because it can easily turn your desk into an unholy mess of cables and peripherals.

What peripherals?

Its not like this 7,000 to $10,000 computer will find its way into many consumers hands. The pricing is such that its only for some very specialized markets and one could make an argument that an x86 based machine could be built around components that provide what the mac pro cannot for less then what apple charges - if internal components were a must

by my estimation, for 99% of the mac buying public, be they consumers or business we use macs that have no internal expansion and we all have to deal with varying levels of unholy messes of cables.

Apple has seemingly tabled an update to the mac pro and put it off to pasture: Mac Pro Reportedly on 'Back Burner' and 'Largely Written Off' at Apple That tells me that they're not selling these in any quantities that makes them a pofit.

 

[JouniS]

What peripherals?

Maybe the storage expansions or faster network options I mentioned.

Apple's desktop offerings are all underwhelming. The hardware itself is great, but the products are weird. The Mac Pro is massively overengineered for the current hardware options, while the Mac Studio is essentially a laptop without a battery and a display. It has all the disadvantages but none of the advantages of a desktop computer.

The Framework Desktop is an interesting attempt at creating a configurable desktop computer for those who don't need a big tower case. I would like to see Apple offering a higher-end version of the same idea with Max and Ultra chips.

 

[Non-Euclidean]

Apple won't do anything in the future with the Mac Pro because that 10% (not 20%) that can't use a Studio Max/Ultra isn't much of a market. Get an external enclosure to host cards if you need to. You can also get better docking stations with upgraded network connections.

Apple sees no profit in designing an expandable/customizable workstation that isn't based around Apple silicon. And it can't be both user upgradeable and use Apple silicon. Given the rate of increase in capability of Apple silicon 5 years from now that 10% will probably be down to 5%. At the same time other capabilities (non-silicon) will increase also.

 

[M4th]

Even if it makes sense for all the reasons already described, it seems a shame to me somehow that Apple will most likely never again have a "flagship" workstation desktop that has much more of a physical presence and wow factor than the Studio.

I guess it's more about specs than the case it comes in anymore, and admittedly the specs are great and getting ever better.

 

[davidec]

I don’t believe Apple will shutdown the MacPro. They do still value their core market of old. I’ve got a packed out MP and I’d be happy to pay extra so I can swap everything over to a new chassis. Not sure how many high speed boxes I could hook up to a Studio before just getting silly. If Apple has no intention of upgrading the MP they should take the M2 off the market.

 

[maflynn]

it seems a shame to me

Yeah, I sort of feel that way as well. I've owned power macs, mac pros, until they got too expensive. Apple has largely moved on from providing user expandable products. One could argue that they have been trying to make their Macs an appliance that you replace

 

[southerndoc]

I think the only real benefit to the Mac Pro is the expansion ports (PCI) for graphics cards. Only video editors probably use those. I could be incredibly wrong, but for most people there isn't that much benefit to owning a Mac Pro.

 

[Ursadorable]

If they discontinue the Mac Pro, I won't be able to build a Mac and laugh at the 5 figure price tag.

 

[deconstruct60]

If they discontinue the Mac Pro, I won't be able to build a Mac and laugh at the 5 figure price tag.

That won’t change.


Mac Studio , full Ultra , 512GB RAM , 16GB SSD —-> $14K .

The Ultra, RAM, and Apple SSD not likely to get cheaper with time.

 

[maflynn]

I think the only real benefit to the Mac Pro is the expansion ports (PCI) for graphics cards.

But you can't use those PCIe slots for GPUs on the mac pro, so that largely mitigates the utility of having expansion cards, and options. Given that most of what's available as internal expansion cards are now available external thunderbolt expansion, that just shrinks its usefulness even more. This is why I'm assuming that the sales of Mac Pros have largely dried up imo

 

[IvyKing]

One reason the Mac Pro may be going away is that MacOS 26.2 will support clustering via Thunderbolt 5 for Mac Studios and M4 Pro Mac Minis. My impression is that this intended for ML/AI, though it should be good for numerically intensive simulations.

 

[deconstruct60]

One reason the Mac Pro may be going away is that MacOS 26.2 will support clustering via Thunderbolt 5 for Mac Studios and M4 Pro Mac Minis. My impression is that this intended for ML/AI, though it should be good for numerically intensive simulations.

Numerically intensive simulations that don't last very long perhaps. ( it is the Mac with no ECC can be a general supercomputer thing again. Didn't work before. Probably won't work this time either at any scale.). If some incorrect answers don't matter much , it can work.


Apple has been trying to push that cart for a while. A snippet from another post I made in another thread.

"...
P.S. Apple did a WWDC demo of a 4 system Mac Studio cluster several years ago. ( WWDC 2022 ).

" Horovod uses a ring all-reduce approach. In this algorithm, each of N nodes communicates with two of its peers multiple times. Using this communication, the worker processes synchronize gradients before each iteration. I'll show this in action using four Mac Studios connected to each other with Thunderbolt cables. For this example, I will train ResNet, a classifier for images. "

Accelerate machine learning with Metal - WWDC22 - Videos - Apple Developer​

Discover how you can use Metal to accelerate your PyTorch model training on macOS. We'll take you through updates to TensorFlow training...

developer.apple.com

I think what is 'new' is more/different function units being accessed cluster style via framework to make it to port around in the growing ecosystem.... "


There is a decent chance that will be cheaper than two ATTO's Gen 4 412 ( dual 100GbE) with higher throughput (and some RDMA support).

Ethernet Network Interface Cards (Smart NICs) - ATTO Technology, Inc.

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That is kind of the "Mac Pro with high bandwidth slots" point customers didn't have to wait 3 years to get there.

Apple is just making it cheaper to do , not something 'new' here. ( even then no dual 100 GbE worth of bandwidth is going to come from some TBv5 even with extra Apple sprinkles on it. ). A substantive problem for the Mac Pro is that Apple has mainly targeted older PCI-e from the past as opposed future cards going forward (e.g, more affordable 200GbE cards on PCI-e v5) .


P.S. decent chance this is also somewhat coupled to Apple working with Broadcom for some AI Server RDMA communcations for non 'low budget' clustering. Apple's libraries need more "lnfiniband verb" like upgrading.

 

[IvyKing]

Numerically intensive simulations that don't last very long perhaps. ( it is the Mac with no ECC can be a general supercomputer thing again. Didn't work before. Probably won't work this time either at any scale.). If some incorrect answers don't matter much , it can work.

Shades of the SunBlade vs Xserve discussion from a bit over 20 years ago. Sun hardware was somewhat slower than the Xserve but the Sun boxes did have ECC. One other aspect was that Solaris was quite a bit more mature than OSX was at that time.

I seem to recall that ECC is implemented internally in at least some RAM.

 

[rb2112]

One reason the Mac Pro may be going away is that MacOS 26.2 will support clustering via Thunderbolt 5 for Mac Studios and M4 Pro Mac Minis. My impression is that this intended for ML/AI, though it should be good for numerically intensive simulations.

I wonder if the software that can make use of multiple cores will just detect all the cores available, CPU or GPU, in the cluster and process appropriately? If so, that would be great as a few years down the road, you could pick up a 3 year old (whatever studio model) and pair it with your existing one and sort of keep up with the newest fastest without buying at those prices.

It really depends on whether your software can parallel process like that. at the moment my GPU sw does but my CPU sw does not.

 

[Varmann]

I wonder if the software that can make use of multiple cores will just detect all the cores available, CPU or GPU, in the cluster and process appropriately? If so, that would be great as a few years down the road, you could pick up a 3 year old (whatever studio model) and pair it with your existing one and sort of keep up with the newest fastest without buying at those prices.

It really depends on whether your software can parallel process like that. at the moment my GPU sw does but my CPU sw does not.

Even if it is not using it in parallel computing tasks it could be very nice if you multitask a lot, like I and many others do. Have a long intense batch job going in the background while carry on with some other tasks. My cores are often fully booked.

 

[rb2112]

Overall the Mac Pro is a failed design, when apple went with their apple silicon design, they doomed the mac pro to the trash heap. The advantages of the mac pro were designed out of the apple silicon.

+1 this.

I don't know if it has failed, but it definitely got eclipsed by the Studio.

I kept watching YT (like Snazzy Labs and others) showing "which PCI-E cards will work", plus not allowing and GPUs to be used .... I guess there is an extremely limited range of users that would choose MacPro over MacStudio.

 

[Pezimak]

+1 this.

I don't know if it has failed, but it definitely got eclipsed by the Studio.

I kept watching YT (like Snazzy Labs and others) showing "which PCI-E cards will work", plus not allowing and GPUs to be used .... I guess there is an extremely limited range of users that would choose MacPro over MacStudio.

I have seen a few actual professional DJ’s or music producers on You Tube videos, and they have either MacBook Pros or Mac Studios, it seems the odd one has an old Mac Pro around for legacy stuff. But music is one area where Macs are synonymous and if that market is moving away, then Apple is successfully replacing the Pro now.

 

[MacGizmo]

I think the Mac Studio replaced the Pro the moment is was announced. The Pro has been dead for a long time, they just haven't had the funeral yet.