Don't waste your money on the Pro, you can get an M2 Ultra in a Mac Studio for $4000. The only reason to buy the Pro is if you have a bunch of really weird PCIe cards[0].

As for the desktop use case... sure, you aren't going to care about the $200 of saved power draw, but not having a very loud and hot machine at your desk has to count for something, right?

[0] GPUs won't work, their memory access is locked out in hardware and Apple removed the MPX connectors that powered the Intel GPU modules.

GPUs won't work at all? Can't you even use them for ML/compute stuff?

They don't work at all, there are no discrete GPU drivers for ARM macOS.

> The cooling solution and 1250W(!) power supply they carried over from the 2019 model are kind of hilariously overkill now

I wonder if that's a small hint or giveaway of something coming in the future that will make use of it.... One can hope.

If they were going to make a dGPU or other big accelerator in the future then I think they would have maintained support for the MPX form factor cards. The new Mac Pro doesn't support those.

GPUs can work provided the drivers exist.

And those really weird PCI cards are what underpins many industries for which the Mac Pro is designed for e.g. video and audio production.

> provided the drivers exist.

Provided Apple signs 'em :p

Microsoft has implemented driver signing with Windows so not sure what the issue is.

And users can still use unsigned drivers provided they disable the option.

Apple has beef with the worlds largest GPU maker and refuses to sign their drivers because they got screwed by that company over a laptop GPU a decade ago and still hold a grudge.

Microsoft on the other hand, is run by adults.

Where can you get these drivers that exist but just aren't signed?

You can’t because Nvidia gave up and stopped developing drivers for macOS. The OS won’t let you install unsigned drivers.

I know I'm a crazy person, but the idea of having a computer that actually won't let me run whatever I want on it is so nuts.

If that was the only barrier you could sign them yourself. They stopped a long time before that though.

The issue is that Apple explicitly doesn’t want to.

If I understand correctly, accesses to address ranges mapped to the GPU have to be aligned on Apple Silicon due to the PCie controller requiring nGnRE mapping mode for external devices. There's a proof-of-concept AMD GPU driver patch for Linux that kinda makes this work but it's an incredible hack, the performance isn't great and applications still need to be reviewed and patched.

> The only reason to buy the Pro is if you have a bunch of really weird PCIe cards

They’re telegraphing the use case for future SOCs.

> They’re telegraphing the use case for future SOCs.

Can someone explain what that means?

Telegraphing means to give away away a message, inadvertently or not.

While the M2 doesn’t include external GPU support, I think the M3 Mac Pro will in order to continue justifying the astronomical price.

Otherwise, Apple would have gone through an awful lot of trouble to design a new motherboard with PCIe slots for an otherwise limited-use case.

In releasing an M2 Mac Pro, Apple is trying to balance a consistent message regarding the ARM transition and customer expectations, but also the hiccups and limited experience of developing desktop CPUs. There may be some silicon bug or silicon-level design oversight in the M2 preventing use of an external GPU.

Discrete GPU support is supposed to be there, but not quite ready.

I’ll take the under on that.

Thanks. So by "for future SOCs" they meant future iterations of Apple Silicon. And you think the use case the gp means is GPU support? I'm not sure I agree thats what they meant.

I was the GP. I don’t know what else to call the M-series chips :)

A proper cooler won't get loud or hot.

And as far as heating the room, okay that's an extra $50 of air conditioning to remove the $200 of heat.

It is not the dollars per watt that matters to many users.

What matters more than people may realize is battery runtime. The Apple hardware just spanks x86 hardware, unless that hardware is fitted with a big battery, and or a secondary one.

I typically run Lenovo hardware, and on my faster machine, I got a very large battery and could get 6 solid hours. And that is at a nice 3Ghz speed too.

My current machine (i5) is far slower than the M1 and that hot running Lenovo. (i7) It has two batteries that can yield 5 to 7 hours.

Those machines are heavier, slower, bigger, and just feel crappy compared to the M1 Air I have been using.

And that thing is crazy good. Battery life is longer, sometimes by a considerable amount. It is great hardware, fast, easy to use, light, you name it.

If we forget about servers.

Which we should because no one is using a Mac as a server.

They should (or equivalent product). ARMv8 processors are much more secure than x86 and will continue to improve in ARMv9.

People used to run Mac OS X servers, but Apple does not care for that market.

If we only consider web servers.

Mac servers are pretty much required for any kind of CICD for Apple development.

Just about any company with an iOS or Mac app will have or rent a Mac server.

Sure. When talking about desktop, personal computing, servers are not really a discussion.

It is when overreacting the extent of Apple achievements in the industry.

Most people in 2nd and 3rd tier countries don't have the necessary means to buy those equipments, and additionally they aren't a presence on servers and embedded markets.

So in those markets it doesn't matter if M2 Ultra smashes AMD and Intel, no one will ever use one.

I has never mattered. I do not understand your point.

M1 mini will make a great home server, would be nice to see someone do a comparison with similar products like Intel NUC for a home server of that size. I'm using an old NUC as a home server and the only drawback is that it only has the capacity for 2 harddrives.

With 8gb of ram and 256gb of storage? Otherwise it is like $1000. So, yeah that buys you a decent home server, but at that price it is kinda underwhelming considering the limited OS compatibility, ports, size (much larger than a NUC), ...

Also, consider how much a PC laptop has to throttle performance if you unplug it from the wall.

Yes! That is often significant. Sometimes worse than half performance, or it will suck the battery dry fast enough to seriously increase battery life decay.

And don’t forget cooling! All that extra power draw generates heat.

  > And don’t forget cooling! All that extra power draw generates heat.

in turn can cause more throttling if its not cooled (loudly) enough

TFA is about the M2 Ultra chip - it is not available in any system that is battery powered. They are in the Max Studio and Mac Pro only.

Power isn’t just the stuff coming out of the wall, it’s also the heat you have to dissipate.