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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

The Mac Studio was a new product category, sitting just beneath the Mac Pro. I suspect during development they were unsure of if it would actually be the Mac Pro, that would have probably been another 2013 Mac Pro debacle though.

The Mac Studio must be decimating Mac Pro sales, it must fit what 70-80% of Mac Pro users wanted. It's going to be incredible hard to Apple to justify development of an extended M architecture for a product used by a tiny fraction of their customers.

It wouldn't surprise me if they didn't press go on full Mac Pro development until they saw how the market reacted to the Studio.

One possibility is they reintroduce the XServe (and maybe XServe Cloud) with the larger expandable architecture to help justify its development.

The only other option is expanding the Mac Studios capability with external "stackable" peripherals, such as eGPUs.

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I think it would be enough for the Pro to just be the same as the highest spec of the next generation Mac Studio, in a form factor that has PCIe and RAM slots. (I wonder if they could do some kind of memory hierarchy where you have, say, 32GB of the on-board unified memory soldered on to the processor like they have now, and then another eight slots or something of regular DDR5 sticks).

XServe would probably be pretty popular with the recent shift to ARM based servers for their lower power consumption. The problem would be their insistance for them to run full blown macOS instead of a dedicated Linux based server OS.

I think there's a chance they'd give you a thin iOS-based server OS (think watchOS or tvOS) with Hypervisor.Framework and let you choose what you run on it.

If they did that it could work. It would need to allow full control of setting up whatever OS you want, be it Windows, *nix based, etc.

That could actually be very exciting.

> XServe would probably be pretty popular with the recent shift to ARM based servers

I've been thinking for a while they'll bring XServe back (or the Mac Pro will be rackable) because they'll save a TON of money.

1. Lower power usage in their own data centres - that's gotta be huge.

2. Buying processors from themselves instead of from Intel.

Hopefully it will help get whatever chip they're going to use in the Mac Pro to some kind of production number that means economies of scale come into play.

The only thing I can see that the Studio can't do is access hardware directly. My M1 Ultra is beyond anything I could need performance wise (I mostly do complex generative art, but I only need all 20 cores only occasionally). I imagine a few people might need more than I have but it's probably not a large number.

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