The Mac Pro’s biggest problem is the MacBook
theverge.com
theverge.com
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.
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.
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.'
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?
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.
EDIT: I don't get why this is getting downvoted. The M2 Ultra really doesn't have very impressive GPU power compared to even consumer offerings from nvidia and AMD. The competitive $7000 workstations would have to have something weaker than a 4080.
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 is "10x" the power of the Mac Pro, at “only” $20000 a pop.
You can be very certain that NVDA did not get unnoticed, as Apple has 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 ).
It seemed like a given (to me, at least) that a new Mac Pro would have:
1. Slots 2. Storage expansion 3. The most CPU & GPU cores available in a Mac 4. DDR5 expansion, in addition to the SoC RAM
In fact, we got #1 and a little bit of #2 (two SATA ports). #3 is a miss, since the Studio offers the same configuration. #4 seems like the biggest miss of all.
Overall it just seems like a pointless machine. The number of use cases where a Mac Studio + TB4 enclosure(s) won’t do can’t possibly be large enough to justify keeping it in the lineup.
It makes zero economic sense for a low volume product like the Mac Pro, even with Apple margins.
EDIT: Also, they would have to seriously compromise performance. A number of GPU cores would have to be removed to make room for the bigger memory controller. The bus would have to be even wider with regular DDR5 DIMMs, and it would suck much more power.
They would presumably use UDIMMs anyway, so maybe there is theoretically space?
Still, that would be one heck of a socket/motherboard. I can't imagine how many motherboard layers and socket pins they would need for 16+ channel DDR5 in such a tiny space... If its even possible to manufacture, it would be hilariously expensive.
As said below, the answer is CXL. Apple would be stupid not to support CXL devices on the M3 or M4, though I would not be surprised if they skip it
Yes, this is 100% true. CXL devices are exactly what the Mac Pro needs.
I think those two details are related in the opposite way people would expect. I think Apple knows extremely well that very few customers want those slots these days. That $3000 takes into account the considerable NRE costs that went into developing the Mac Pro since no other model has PCI slots.
This is designed to be a very low-volume product. One of the few “Pro” products Apple sells where the name is sincere.
The speculation I’ve seen (on Ars forums) about RAM is generally a consensus that this is a stopgap, with future base volume increases expected and a future multiple of die connections (a so called “Extreme” being a 4x Max). I don’t think RAM expansion is coming back to the Mac platform for the foreseeable future outside of some kind of hypothetical way to add more SoCs.
Just like the current 13” MBP, just like the old iPhone SE, the “new” Mac Pro exists to fulfill some manufacturing contracts and/or use up existing stock of the chassis.
A “real” Apple Silicon Mac Pro will come in 2-5 years (my best guess is 3), mark my words.
The point of the pro, at least in the past, was the ability to build an incredibly powerful, expandable computer, relative to the other offerings at the time. But Apple has moved further toward integration to get wins in perf/efficiency. It seems to be a product that no longer fits in their ethos.
That you can get a machine that's just 2x as powerful as a laptop - at 2x the cost - isn't particularly compelling.
From a "real pro" machine I expect to be able to upgrade it for at least three to five years. These things cost thousands of dollars ffs.
High speed interconnect, maybe proprietary.
Potentially multiple sockets if they can’t scale their current design.
Fast, redundant, hot swappable storage.
They have the source and can compile for themselves. I doubt x86 support will truly leave while it’s still the only way to do servers.
There's no way Apple would invest in all that technology to sell its least popular Mac.
It is very difficult to predict which parts are going to be successful.
And if they manage to create a product definitively better that competitors (like the current gen ARM macbooks), they are going to sell a lot more than 50,000 per year. There are single companies which can afford to buy 50,000 units.
They made the 14 and 16, but they presumably still had plenty of 13" frames left, so they're just selling both. Jobs-era Apple likely wouldn't have done that, as it causes the product lineup to be a good bit less clear, but in Cook-era Apple, that's an acceptable tradeoff.
For whatever reason, this did not come true. I suspect that Apple ran into technical issues trying to combine 4x Max dies into one SoC and have all the CPUs, Neural Engines, and GPU cores act as a single chip to macOS. Another reason could be that Apple decided that it's uneconomical to design such an "extreme" SoC for a niche market/machine.
Personally, I think Apple will release an M3/M4 "Extreme" that will go into the Mac Pro. I also suspect that Apple will try to create some sort of "Apple Silicon Cloud" in order to expand the market for such monstrous chip. The traditional workstation is a declining market. Such cloud would also be a way for Apple to serve customers who want cloud workstations.
[0]https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-is-reputedly-developing-...
(I confess I don't know enough about cloud tech or AI to know how far off the mark I am; I'm just weaving threads out of reading headlines)
Your IT professionals will thank you for getting actual IT grade equipment with actual IT grade management interfaces.
Here are some examples, used mainly in pro audio/video/broadcast workflows:
RME MADI/AES cards: https://www.rme-audio.de/internal-cards.html
ProTools HDX cards: https://www.avid.com/products/pro-tools-hdx
BlackMagic DeckLink cards: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/nl/products/decklink
UAD DSP cards: https://www.uaudio.com/uad-accelerators/uad-2-pcie.html
Plus 25/40/100G Ethernet, NVME SSD and Fibre Channel/SAN cards.
But we’re not quite there yet.
At least all the audio cards should be doable as external boxes.
We've also got USB-C in the meantime, including a lot of USB-C displays.
So I think this is a case of "too early". The market looks very different today at how fast external communication is.
I'd say that MacStudio is really todays TrashCan. Much better timing, so much better success.
It is almost the reverse of TB1/TB2, when a mini-DisplayPort connector was used to negotiate TB.
I struggle to think of workflows that require macOS for this, given it has conceeded the high end of performance to others.
You can't match that speed with nvme. Samsung 990 Pro only gets 7.3 GB/s sequential read.
edit: I stand corrected.
Only the the highest bandwidth cards, like certain NVMe SSD's, and network cards, need a full bandwidth slot.
The "trash can" was the last Mac Pro that you should realistically consider to be at least partly targeted towards end consumers. The problem is that Apple won't come out and tell us exactly who the envision as the customers for the to last generations of the Mac Pro.
My best guess is that they either have NO IDEA who should buy this and only created it to shut up people on the internet and officially complete the ARM transition. Alternatively they have a few high profile customers who specifically asked for it and the "feature set" is tailored to those select customers.
People online, like myself, took a huge interest in the Mac Pro, not because we'd ever get one, at least not new, but because the prospect of a high power ARM motherboard with replaceable RAM, storage and PCI-E ports was just to enticing. We just wanted to see how they'd pull it of, and then they didn't.
The 2019 was a very flexible machine, the 2023 is a lot less flexible. Don't expect that to change - the GPU and RAM will be staying on the SoC because that's the architecture every other Apple device has. You really wouldn't want to be in a world where the lowest selling Mac is the only one that still uses NUMA.
And then there are capabilities that Apple silicon doesn't do, like storage device DMA into GPUs, GPU Work Graphs,...
If your GPU workflow is instead VRAM bottlenecked with unpredictable data access patterns then Apple silicon has the potential to be faster with that crazy amount of uRAM.
There’s also a dark tail of applications currently using the CPU because CPU-GPU-CPU latency is too damn high. Having everything on the same SoC will be a substantial latency improvement, which will enable using the GPU in places that discrete GPUs can’t go.
So if you’re doing 3D/vfx you’re probably unhappy, although as far as I know none of these people use Macs anyway, they all use PCs with high-end Nvidia cards.
On the other hand, this chip is going to be incredible for audio, once applications start taking advantage of it. Audio programming is really latency sensitive so discrete GPUs are right out, but with an SoC you can start to rely on the GPU being able to serve your request on time.
Before Apple Silicon, the performance ratio between a Mac Pro and the rest of their lineup was large. I think people were hoping the same ratio would somehow hold true today (i.e. rumors of a new M2 variant that was somehow two M2 Ultra stitched together, in the same way the Ultra is two Max, and the Max is two Pro...)
I'm sure someone out there is running a gigantic local storage setup with U.2 drives and the new Mac Pro, and is doing something that would require so many PCIe slots, but it does seem very niche.
Yeah yeah they suck and are pointless and your Thinkpad dug out of a Goodwill dumpster running Arch Linux is 100x more powerful etc etc
But: they’re assembled in Austin, TX. Perhaps one of the only things Apple makes that’s assembled domestically? Are we sure the continued existence of the Mac Pro isn’t the result of some kind of tax scheme or trade tariff boondoggle?
If the world goes further mad and US-Chinese relations sour, and/or if the institutional racism of globalisation is finally dismantled, such that manufacturing costs a similar amount the world over, Apple already have a functioning PoC for US assembly.
Ever since Jobs returned in 1997, Apple's Mac lineup has been designed around the idea of a ternary choice of "Good / Better / Best". They used to call the Power Mac configurations explicitly that.
I suppose putting the Mac Studio guts inside a Mac Pro case wasn't a big design change, as long as they have the Pro manufacturing line still open. By shipping this lackluster design, they can wringe out a bit more revenue from the investment made in the Mac Pro tooling.
https://hypercritical.co/2013/03/08/the-case-for-a-true-mac-...
Sad that other than in price, Apple has really just given up on this.
I can't be the only one doing ML development this way.
I do have a Windows machine with an nVidia GPU (RTX 2070 Super), but I don't use it anymore (bought it years ago).
ML on the cloud is way more convenient because you can trivially adjust your cost based on what you're doing: Training? spin up something big/expensive. Inference? cheaper (less VRAM) is usually fine.
I also like that I can run multiple instances simultaneously, something that would be prohibitively expensive if I had to have multiple machines sitting around waiting for me to use them.
The M1/M2 is brilliant for the form factors that consist of about 90% of PC demand. Macs are better as a device than almost any PC on a few axes.
But… an architecture using an SoC to scale from an iPhone to a large personal server, which is what a modern era Workstation really is will hit limits.
IMO, the failure was they were boxed into dropping MacOS Intel support in the near future, and for whatever reason were unable to ship the Apple Silicon they intended to. So they shipped a compromised Mac Pro that meets the needs of a few key use cases that can sorta work with the limited top line memory.
Intel segmented their products because they had the similar constraints. There’s a mondo-expensive 8 core 4 GHz+ part, and a part with lots of cores at half the speed. In Intels case, the memory is of course not part of the SoC.
1) Expandable RAM
2) Trivially replaceable internal storage
3) Affordable to software developers
2023 Apple silicon Mac Pro:
None of the above
Craig Federighi in 2017: “I think if you use Xcode downloads as a metric, it’s possible software developers are actually our largest pro audience. It’s growing very quickly, it’s been fantastic.” https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives
I personally had a 2010 Mac Pro, and it was fantastic. But since then, Apple never again produced a Mac Pro that I wanted to or could buy. Going from $2500 base price in 2012 to $7000 in 2023 is absurd.
If you compare Apple's other Macs, for example the iMac had a base price of $1300 in 2012, and in 2023 it's... $1300.
I can visualize what could have happened 6 months before WWDC:
Tim Cook: So, where are we on the Mac Pro transition?
Hardware team: We've got nothing.
Tim Cook: We need to launch. What's the quickest way we can launch a Mac Pro by WWDC?
Hardware team: I guess we could slap an M2 Ultra on the motherboard of the last Mac Pro and call it a day.
Tim Cook: Excellent. Let's do it.
This is mostly correct. But it’s also mostly a product they haven’t cared about for approximately a decade. Two revisions, one completely rejected by almost all of its target market and positioned exactly opposite to the new offering. They know there’s a non-zero customer base they want to supply here, but every other part of their business is contrary to supplying it. The only reason they really care to supply it at all is network effects, and they also realize that’s way past diminishing returns. I think the only reason they even bothered besides prior commitments is lineage at this point.
I mean at the end of the day the product line does make money.
Marc Gurman received insider information about a 4x Max SoC 3 years ago. He was right about the 2x Max SoC which became the Ultra.
They would be manufacturing 4x Max dies, which have no yield issues, and then combine them together in a separate process.
* I had a Mac Pro until 2016, sold it and used the money to buy a second monitor
* I had an iMac 2019-2022, sold it because I bought an M1 MacBook Pro 16", which was faster
Right now I very much enjoy a single-computer life, much less overhead. I anticipate I'll want to upgrade to an M3 MacBook Pro, but I don't see a need to use anything else, especially as the CPU (what I care about!) performance isn't significantly better in the Mac Studios or Mac Pros.
I used to need a big desktop/workstation for "real work" and had an ultrabook for all the related admin stuff that I like to do out of the office for sanity. Two machines isn't difficult to manage but it can be a bit annoying. Having one machine that can do everything without compromise is a dream.
Not to mention this one MacBook Pro, while expensive, is still cheaper than what I used to spend on a desktop+ultrabook setup. It is so close to perfect I pretty much have nothing to complain about which as my wife will attest to is unheard of for me when it come to computer :)
I had toyed with the idea of getting an Air and a Mac Studio and continuing to work in my old two machine way but with how good the MacBook Pro's are I realised I no longer needed to do that and I am very happy I made the decision to just go all in with a good MacBook Pro and not think about it anymore.
Maybe if they add something like cellular to the MBP I might be tempted, but even then wifi is ubiquitous now.
It just handles everything I throw at it with ease, I honestly don't think I'd benefit from upgrading to any of the M2s, or even a higher spec M1/more RAM.
Believe me, at some point your computer will be slow and old.
So here's my completely baseless theory: M2 Ultra PCIE coprocessor cards.
These cards could be upgradable, and they would include CPU, GPU, and memory. It would transform the Mac Pro into an incredibly powerful machine.
This is a type of product that already exists. And Apple can definitely do this, since they control the entire product.
NICs for high speed networks that are used in share video editing
SDI cards for video
Maybe Apple ends up implementing something like CXL down the line, anyway.
They should implement ECC memory, though.
They are very niche and very expensive, hence almost everyone buys 2P servers instead.
This means a M2 Ultra PCIe card/backplane desktop supercomputer takes 192GB/5.9GB/s = 32.54s per node minimum to fill the whole 192GB of RAM - I don't know how to interpret this, is this going to mean the cluster will be I/O limited, or will it be actually limited by CPU?
I think a lot of the 'mac pro' thinking from 15 years ago was you needed a 'big pro machine' to do serious work. Nowadays, these machines only eat up space, energy, produce noise and while they can be faster the returns are diminishing and you don't need it for a lot of serious tasks. It's a bit of the Unix workstation vs PC market repeat. While some people will hold on to their 'big PC' as long as they can Apple (and hopefully others) will release vertically integrated small machines that offer serious performance and eventually will take over the market.
I just replaced my 9-year old Macbook Pro with an M2 mini and, understandably, it feels like a massive upgrade. But the laptop didn't even feel particularly old after a decade, just 'underpowered'. I've realised that upgrading is a nice option to have, but it's even nicer just to not need it in the first place.
That was always a reason why I only use Macs at the employer and not privately, the price tag for a gamer setup.
It is cheaper to get a graphics workstation laptop than one of these models, let alone a desktop model with a nice set of cards connected in SLI mode.
MKBHD recently did a pretty good video exactly on this type of question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2KbwC-s7pY
PCIe configuration of the 2023 Mac Pro: 1 Two double-wide full length x16 gen4 slots Two double-wide full length x8 gen4 slots Two single-wide full length x8 gen4 slots One single-wide half length x4 gen3 slot preconfigured with the Apple I/O card and up to 192GB RAM.
Meanwhile, a typical real-world workstation mobo like the Asus Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE offers: 2 7 x PCIe 4.0/3.0 x16 slot(s) Up to 2TB RAM
In my use case, I require 512GB RAM (next stop 1TB) and plenty of cores for heavy parallel build action, a Blue-team graphics card, 3 cards of fully-populated Asus Hyper M.2 X16 and a high-speed NIC, plus some life-improvements like a 4-port USB-C card. Requirements that seem to outstrip the capabilities of this new machine.
Hey, I love the appearance and feel, and I'm used-to and productive with MacOS on desktop. Up until iOS and newer cousins took over Apple's revenue sheet in the early 2010s, the x86 Mac Pro was a permanent fixture under my desk and a reliable partner. That plus a well-specced Linux box and I never had to worry about being out of action. But since that time, my impression is that it and Mac on the desktop in general feels like it's in decline, neglected, it's software increasingly abandonware, Apple's conception of the target market is every-more narrowly defined and on a just-enough basis, and perhaps most important of all the system's first allegiance no longer to me.
Maybe I need to accept or re-conceptualize that Mac Pro today is just for a narrow group of content creators, at least for the meantime...
1 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213661 2 https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/wo...
Because lots of professionals travel with their gear or have a studio where everything needs to be be rack-mounted.
1. Too many tabs open in Firefox (not sure where to pin the blame here) 2. Some weird interaction between Jetbrains Rider and Unity that has high CPU
I really don't want to switch to Safari because I move between PC and Mac a lot.
2. Increase the memory settings for Jetbrains. Otherwise being a JVM based editor it will be using lots of CPU aggressively garbage collecting.
I suppose it's possible there's a browser extension that might fix it, but it needs to run on Windows, iOS, MacOS and Android.
Only seems to sync bookmarks.
That will tell you which tabs are problematic. For me it was a bit surprising, LinkedIn for some reason eats a bunch of CPU. Or maybe not so surprising, heh.
Then just unload the tab in tree style tab and check it when you need instead of having it always open.
Apple really has three options here:
- ignore that segment of the market
- create their own GPU AIBs and a software platform to make them attractive
- invite NVIDIA back onto the platform
Of these, the first one seems the most likely. The last one would be the most expedient, but conflicts with Apple policies against having a working solution that makes someone else look better than them.
Gaming clearly isn’t, for Apple.
But running LLMs might be, time will tell if running them locally is going to become commonplace.
Yeah, because you're not one of them. Anyone that needs to run specialist PCI cards, and there are many people out there particularly in video capture (not just GPUs) will need to spend the money on this machine. And as for the oodles of power, high definition video will find a way to use it. We could have stopped at 4K but the quality and resolution chase isn't ever going to end because it tracks Moore's Law. Try being an artist using ultra-high def video for example, and try maxing out the machine for 6-12 months to see if you can get anything maximally creative out of it. Testing for a couple of days just means you're only using it for the basic journalistic stuff you're doing on every other Mac.
Just because you can't think of your use case for something, doesn't mean that nobody has a use for it.
Finally, if you're producing hundreds of thousands of dollars of value per year, then the ten grand cost of one of these machines is just a tax write-off. It's not designed as some competist's toy at that price, same with the phenomenally expensive display. Apple taxing money off the tax man.
The conceit of the article is that the author isnt a "pro" (whatever that means), so they went out and talked to a bunch of people in different industries, and no one had a use for the Mac Pro.
> tax write-off
Ahh, they just write it off!
Author talked to a handful of people, none of whom are using PCI cards or complex workflow. Even when he talks to the video editor who is using a MacBook for editing, he doesn’t consider that video has to be ingressed in a professional way, he’s just editing it. There are a bunch of use cases for this Mac Pro, and the author has committed a fallacy in saying “there are no use cases for the Mac Pro” just because he didn’t find anyone who needed one.
Yeah people can use Linux and windows workstations, sure. It would be trivial for Apple to abandon that sector of the market and stick to devices. I’m pretty sure that once the Apple Vision headset comes out, and perhaps a generation or two down the line with wholly-Apple chipsets, certain people will be clamouring for Mac Pros again (i.e. - stereo feeds from phenomenally high definition video cameras to provide content real-time…). But by all means stick with your shade throwing and sarcasm, what do I know, I just have 25 years experience in the industry.
But why? I would think with less size, energy, and weight constraints, it would be cheaper to make. Or at least it could be cheaper. And if it cost less, there would be a reason to choose it. So the only reasons I can think of for it to be so much more expensive, is they don't want it to compete with MacBook sales, and/or they are trying to extract as much revenue as possible from the niche customers who absolutely need PCIe slots.
Disclaimer: completely unaware of what that means.
Does it preclude such a card working _at all_ or can it still be used e.g for e.g CUDA?
Would it be possible for e.g Nvidia to create a special batch of cards or design that would work for such cases? (priced through the roof given the small user base but that'd also be the kind of user base who would drop stupid amounts of money without batting an eye)
Whereas All current PCI-E graphics cards include their memory on the card itself. Which means the CPU is having to copy data to, and from the external graphics card to do basic video operations.
In this interview on The Talk Show, John Ternus, vice president of Apple hardware, says he sees no way to incorporate external graphic cards into the Apple Silicon architecture (at 22:48)
The problem is more likely that the SoC does not have a sufficiently good PCI-E implementation much like the RPi and other ARM SoCs.
paying $15K for a Mac Pro (without screen) to be tethered to a desk isn't a very creative solution in 2023, WFH / remote working requires agility. MacBook Pros are very powerful already.
Plus, consumers are going to want more Energy Efficient / Green products, and that means long-lasting too (reduce waste).
Why have the desktop? Power. M1 Ultra is a beast, throwing a little more money at a device that isn't going to die because the battery expired or I crack the screen made sense to me. I'm also mostly at my desk, mostly for ergonomic reasons: I hurt _less_ if I'm in a good chair where everything is tuned to my height.
True, you get raw power from a high-end desktop/workstation, but cloud services have eaten-up missive chunks of of dev work. MacBook is a good medium (Jack of all trades)
For distributed Machine Learning workloads it also make sense to combine a CPU and a GPU per pluggable module. In such workloads, data that needs to be processed by a specific GPU (i.e. for training), is usually preprocessed by a CPU. In Intel machines with multiple Nvidia cards, this implies that you need a single beefy CPU with high core count. Having a CPU and GPU in each module makes sense from this perspective.
So as soon as the new Mac Pro was announced at WWDC, I did a quick check on the diff between it and the Mac Studio and instantly bought the Studio. I've had it for 2 weeks and it's been fantastic. Although I loved the old flexibility, part of that's gone, and part of it is just not worth the price Apple wants. And Apple has just pushed this price way above the value. Now that the performance is the same, they've limited the market dramatically.
But that’s OK, because it seems they are pushing their desktop OS in the direction of a phone OS too, both in capability and lockdown, so it might all be good.
This is still the most powerful Unix desktop system out there, and there's nothing keeping "power users" (in lack of a better term) from treating it as such.
They've been talking about this for years though, and I think with people like Craig Federighi in place, there's no real danger of further lock downs.
One could also consider eBPF as "war on kernel extensions" on Linux. I honestly think there should be an eBPF port to macOS.
This piece, while quite good, doesn’t dive into this, but I am curious whether MacStadium has plans to do anything with the Mac Pros that they wouldn’t with the Studios.
$3,000 for access to slots that you can get on a $500 desktop seems like an upcharge designed to discourage people from buying it.
[1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/pajmk9/who-kept-buying-the-m...
and admittedly graphics cards are now more than graphics cards now, they do GPU accelerated computing and machine learning. And apple software would not support those things on a GPU.
It is sort of like Steven Covey's progression from Dependence to Independence to Interdependence. Apple with the early intel mac pro broke through from independence to interdependence. That machine used 3rd-party intel processors, worked with not only macos, but 3rd party windows, had expandability via memory and 3rd party hard drives, and used 3rd party graphics cards from nvidia and amd. They worked with the entire silicon valley ecosystem, making their machines more valuable and the ecosystem stronger.
Now apple is independent again, and is looking right down into its own navel like a self-involved loner.
So, it'll probably work for adding (say) a single 50 or 100GBe card, but seems like it's wasted a bunch of potential. :/
the mac pro only exists for the few use cases where you need a non-gfx pcie card. if you don't have one of those use cases, then you don't need a mac pro and apple has lots of other computers they will be happy to sell you. theverge article seems to think this is somehow bad?
NuBus, AppleTalk, Quicktime, QuickTime VR, QuickDraw 3D,...
Also, do Apple employees at Apple Headquarters get fully-specced out Mac Pros at their desktops for their work?
I don't see why the Apple employees wood, most of the Apple silicon and mobo isn't really being used for coding and such
No coding happening at Apple. /s
No GPU support, but the slide during the presentation showed extended storage (4-8xNVME to PCIe adapters are fairly inexpensive I think), SDI video ingestion, ProTools HDX cards (music I/O and DSP), 25GbE card, and I think a fiber channel one. Since then a third-party company announced a networked audio card.
Possibly some special-purpose accelerator cards; IIRC the first-party Afterburner cards on the last mac pro were FPGA-based; video acceleration is now built into the M2 chips.
I think most of the extra ports that differentiate a Mac Pro 2023 from a Mac Studio Ultra on the spec sheet are on a small PCIe card included with the machine that stays in the top slot.
b) No.
Probably something like this $5000 Avid Pro Tools card https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1385850-REG/avid_9900...
People make these upgrades in trim options on their cars all the time.
It is not like Macs with Intel chips, which can easily install an alternative operating system.
Asahi Linux is still a work in progress but shockingly usable for its age, and will no doubt be ready to roll by the time the first M-series macs have their support dropped. I’ve read that OpenBSD is bootable on M-series macs too, so that may also be an option.
Additionally, while I don’t think Microsoft will ever take the invitation, Apple has publicly stated they’d welcome an Apple Silicon port of Windows.