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Comment by icedchai | Hacker News Reader

Because it costs them money to maintain it, and they'll make more money when people upgrade to M series?

In all seriousness, it's a little lame. Consider that the Intel Mac Pro (2019 model) was still selling in 2023! That's not that long ago, and those were their highest end machines in terms of memory capacity. The "new" Mac Pro has since been discontinued...

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Though buying a Mac Pro in 2023 would be a bit weird. The writing was on the wall. By that point the M1 was almost out for three years and even the Mac Studio with M1 Ultra had been out for a year.

(IMO it stopped making sense buying an Intel Mac after the M1 Air or if your want to be generous the M1 Pro/Max-based MacBook Pros.)

A bit, but then, it was sold by Apple and some people saw a need for it. Like having tons of memory and of course, being x86-compatible also has its uses. That is, why Rosetta 2 exists. Applying the 7 year support window, they should support it till 2030. Especially, as it was the most expensive hardware sold.

I agree, it is weird, but there were certain workloads (like those needing large memory) that wouldn't run anywhere else. Remember that M1 Ultra, at that time, was limited to 128G of RAM. M2 Ultra brought it to 192G. Intel Mac Pros could take 1.5 TB.

I wonder what the market price of 1.5 TB RAM today would be and if selling that off would pay for the whole Mac Pro :)

But if you wanted to buy an OSX machine with up to 1.5TB of memory, you only had a brief window between when the new Mac Pro was announced and the old Mac Pro was discontinued to snag one before that option went away forever. The M-series Mac Pro only ever supported 192GB.

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