The Mac Pro lives on as a Mac Studio for people who need PCIe cards for their audio/video hardware to connect to. That's it.
The only issue I see is their lack of support for video cards integrating their output into the thunderbolt ports. Which is a problem they pretty much solved in the last Mac Pro with their MPX extension to PCI-E, which conveniently provided additional power and allowed the injection of displayport signal into the thunderbolt outputs.
The Mac Pro is Apple saying: “if you need more than 192GB of RAM, we can’t help. But if you need PCI-E, we have a lot of old Mac Pro enclosures left over from the past 3 years when we didn’t sell any Intel Mac Pros, here’s a Mac Studio in a bigger box, enjoy”
Regarding socketable memory - I believe that their current memory setup is significantly faster than any system with socketed memory. Given that they market the memory bandwidth heavily in their specs I imagine this would lead to a perceived performance drop for what is essentially their most expensive system.
My one gripe with the new pro is that they have reintroduced a problem they themselves solved, because they chose to not support discrete GPUs. MPX looks like a really neat solution to both internal system cable management, and the routing of thunderbolt and display data through the system. It's a shame it only existed in one generation of one product
Interestingly enough from looking at pictures of the new system board - they have less power cable connectors than the 2019. Is the new system using a smaller capacity PSU than the old?
They probably gonna kit whole studios out with these things.
The reasons given by the studio people interviewed make sense. They get a lot more graphics bang for the buck with Nvidia-equipped PCs, and they can upgrade piecemeal.
Additionally for video pros, they were burned by Apple's consumer-oriented FCP X product overhaul over a decade ago and the mistrust still lingers:
'And while Apple’s decision to overhaul Final Cut Pro was over a decade ago, studios still haven’t forgotten. Almost all of the video professionals I spoke to brought it up. “Every filmmaker in the world was using this,” Lebensfeld complained. “And they lost that whole market. They just don’t take it seriously.”
'“They really did screw us over on that,” Ford, the documentarian, agreed. “I was really upset.”
'I searched high and low and ended up connecting with over 20 professionals for this story in order to locate someone who enthusiastically wanted to buy the Mac Pro. I found exactly one: Drofa. He loves the cheese-grater design.
'“The killer feature is when somebody comes and says, ‘Okay, you have a Mac Pro,’ and I say, ‘Yeah, I can make a cheesesteak,’” he explained.'
However, it's not competitive with workstations that are above that because you'll quickly approach workstations that have Epyc and professional Nvidia cards.
We'll need to wait for an Mx "Extreme" SoC, if Apple ever makes one, to compete above the $7,000 price point.
Except, I guess, for the Mac Studio.
I honestly don't have any examples out of my head. LLM inference is compute bound AFAIK.
(I don't have these devices but have been researching LLM inference performance in the interest of buying a machine for them.)
Advantage goes to M2 Ultra if you ever might need more than 48GB VRAM. I think it's unlikely nvidia is going to release a significantly higher VRAM consumer card anytime soon, since that's what their A100s are for.
That's 512GB of high bandwidth RAM that you'd have to piece together 7 Nvidia H100 80GB cards to match. Each H100 80GB card costs $30,000+. Seven of them would cost $210k alone.
Now of course 7 H100s would have more compute power, but if what you need is a lot of high bandwidth RAM such as a large LLM or highly detailed scene rendering, then maybe an M3 "Extreme" would have the best value out there, by far.
Apple don't tend to make the same mistake twice, this time they created the new marketing category for that product. 99% of people who would have been in the "Pro" category are happy getting a "Studio", plus a bunch upgrading from an iMac.
The Studio is the new Pro to them, it's just for marketing they needed to change the name and have a "continuation line" for the old product. As you said it's here for the long haul but mostly has a legacy range.
They could also create some sort of blade server.. they print their own cups in literally everything. Phone, laptops, headset, apple cinema displays. The production cost of an M1 is about $30.
Remember that the 5-year $1.5B contact with AWS will expire next year. They already have XCode cloud, and have enabled virtualization natively for a while
Either large Mac Pro based rack-servers or accelerators for rendering, transcoding, and AI/ML.
They could market those 10x$30 chips on a single board as something that he 10x the power of the Mac, at “only” $20000 a pop.
You can be very certain that NVDA did not get unnoticed, while Apple had the same capabilities, and sees a future in AI/ML.
The only reason XCode Cloud (or XCode at all) exists is because people need it to develop for ios, if developers could choose anything else they would.
At this point they are a luxury consumer product company, that is where the margins are that have made them successful for the last 10 years.
As for a public cloud, maybe not yet.. the problem with it is that it can be difficult to change/unwind.
However, they might just want to sell those sweet high margin AI/ML cycles running on both the backend and the client devices
What do you mean? It has an x16 PCIe 4 slot, that's more than enough for any video card.
There's another thing Apple do with bad products, though. The original 13" Aluminum Macbook launched in November 2008. It was discontinued in June 2009, in favour of the 13" Macbook Pro, which offered a permanently built-in battery (the previous model had a removable battery), and dropped Firewire. That stayed on sale, subject to regular spec bumps, until October 2012, when they bumped the screen to a retina display ...
I'm not an insider, just a long-term Apple watcher (been using Macs since 1991): what seems to happen is they used to get an internal goal to fill a niche in the product range by a certain date, and if the performance target isn't quite achievable they ship whatever they've got -- then iterate on it, possibly with a model branding change.
The Mac Pro looks like a classic case of this: Tim Cook committed Apple to being 100% Apple Silicon across the range by the end of 2022, they missed, but they had to ship something to keep the Mac Pro brand alive. So they shipped a turkey (a Mac Studio with PCI slots and a higher price tag).
What happens next is: either they ship the real Apple Silicon Mac Pro in a year or two (with who-knows-what changes, but something to differentiate it from the top of the Mac Studio range other than price), or they admit defeat and kill the Pro range altogether, or maybe downgrade it to be the name of the top end Mac Studio.
But this model won't be available for more than two years, max.
There were a lot of rumors around a quad-chip (a ultra is just 2 M* Max's) that was 2 ultras fused together but the yields were terrible and they scrapped it. I've heard speculation that they might be trying again with M2/M3's but yeah, as it stands now the Mac Pro is very lack luster.
Honestly even if they manage a quad-chip design it's still missing things professionals want (more ram, more GPU power). I'm not at all in the market for this device but I really hope Apple pulls it off. Apple is better when it has devices spanning the whole spectrum even if the edges (low-end phone, high-end desktop) don't have blockbuster sales. You sweet spot of sales is empowered by those 2 extremes and benefits from it.
An M3 extreme which is 2 or even 4 M3 ultras sounds like it might be doable. M3 is already going to be a huge performence step because it’s a new process though.
That’s one of the good things about Apple- you know the product will stick around, rightly or wrongly. It’s not as bad now, but other big companies would try to moonshot with a new product then kill it if it didn’t get traction.
Things like the MS Surface and Google Pixel are the recent-ish exceptions to this where you could actually have confidence buying them as they are established product lines and they won’t get cancelled next month ( well you shouldn’t buy a pixel due to the chronic emergency call crash problems, but that’s a separate issue ).
The truth is that Intel spent a lot of time plugging away at all the different mechanisms that you could try to get performance, and one of those is high bandwidth peripheral interfaces. Apple hasn't got there yet, it doesn't have a chip with a tonne of transceivers on it that it can use to hook up a massive GPU, and to get there they need to not only get all the transceiver work sorted, they also need to build an entire software stack to deliver that performance. All to benefit the lowest revenue product in their line up chasing a sector that's not growing.
So what will happen? The same thing that happened with all of Apple's bad products- they'll continue to offer it for sale at incredibly high margins for eternity and never attempt to make it more competitive. Let me point you to the Mac Pro Trash can, it was almost immediately obvious that the product didn't deliver. What is the reasonable thing to do? Do a redesign as soon as possible! What did they do? Quote from Wikipedia:
>On September 18, 2018, the Mac Pro surpassed the Macintosh Plus's production life record for an unchanged Mac model, with the Plus having remained on sale unchanged for 1,734 days. It was discontinued on December 10, 2019, after being on sale unchanged for a record 2,182 days.
The new Mac Pro is going to be here for a very long time is my guess.