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What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

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Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#141

Post by jsjohnst »

thewebcount wrote: post #28
ksec wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How will Apple recoup the cost of designing a powerful chip for a product like the Mac Pro, which is presumably their lowest-selling product? Which is the question I have been asking since 2015 . From a cost prospective it never made any sense. Presumably they will wait until Mac Studio becoming powerful enough to fill the gap. >but the Mac Pro seems to be a clear case where using a powerful off-the-shelf Intel chip…

What do you mean without Metal support? All Intel Macs shipped for the last 5 years at least have supported Metal.

I have a 2011 Mac Pro that supports Metal. ;) I think it was Mojave (10.14) that required Metal support for all graphics cards, which effectively killed off a bunch of older machines, but the Mac Pro was the one that had Metal support going back the furthest to I think 2010 (most others were 2012 or later).

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#142

Post by jsjohnst »

xoac wrote: post #117
brailsafe wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you really look into what's available, there's a fair bit of variation in the market for different customers, but there's incredibly few 5k+ displays at 27 or ~30 inches. Like zero if you discount the LG. Everything else is kind of ok, but not always a good replacement.

This is about to change with higher spec connectors being more widely available.

> This is about to change with higher spec connectors being more widely available.

Thunderbolt 3 has been around for over five years on mainstream Mac (and Windows) machines, so what’s the excuse again?

I can count the number of monitors in the same resolution space (or higher) on one hand! ;) There’s the insanely priced XDR 6K, there’s the not much better priced Dell 8K, then there’s the LG 5K that’s cheap plastic build quality and hasn’t been refreshed in 5 years. Anyone else? … Bueler?

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#143

Post by jltsiren »

michaelt wrote: post #101
sylens wrote: post #76

Apple’s high end desktop strategy has been confusing to me for several years now. They made a big deal out of the iMac Pro, even though that seemed like an obvious quick fix for power users since the new Mac Pro wasn’t ready at the time. However, I never understood why Pros would want to pay more for an an all-in-one they couldn’t self service or upgrade when they probably already had monitors they preferred using. T…

> I don’t remember previous Mac Pros being targeted this exclusively; heck, somebody in my freshman dorm in 2006 had the cheese grater Pro at the time for music production. Well, even before the rise of covid-induced work-from-home, Apple has been shepherding almost all of their users onto laptops. That college student's 2006 Mac Pro might have had 1GB RAM [1] - but these days, Apple has a laptop for users wanting 64…

The switch to working from home made high-end workstations a bit more relevant. While offices had fast and reliable internet connections, the quality of home internet is often much worse. You can't rely on the cloud as much from home as from office.

I develop bioinformatics methods and software, and I see significant productivity gains when I can run tests with full datasets locally. So far I've been using an iMac with 128 GB RAM, but I'd like to upgrade to something with 256 GB or even 512 GB. As the Mac Studio is pretty underwhelming from my perspective, the options are basically a hypothetical Mac Pro and a Linux box.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#144

Post by avidphantasm »

matwood wrote: post #114
esskay wrote: post #54

I think its fairly obvious they've hit some problems. I know they lost a lot of key people in their silicon development team so perhaps thats the reason. Whatever it is they're struggling to get the performance they need for a Mac Pro level machine. I'd imagine part of it is going to be that they'll want to continue using Nvidia or AMD GPU's to allow for higher performance. That can't be an easy or simple thing to ge…

> I know they lost a lot of key people in their silicon development team so perhaps thats the reason. Maybe, but people are always coming and going on any team. This whole story felt like a tempest in a teapot type of thing. IMO, given the typical lead time of hardware, we're finally seeing Apple have issues stemming from covid/supply chain breakdowns.

Also, there’s a tension between the tightly integrated M1 Ultra and the expandability implied by the Mac Pro in its classic form (which the 2019 model revived). It almost seems like they need to go multi-socket with NUMA to scale CPU and memory further. This presents a very different programming model than the shared everything model of the Mac Studio.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#145

Post by matwood »

esskay wrote: post #56
jamujamu wrote: post #4

Hopefully what’s also left is a 27-inch iMac with M2 or M2 Pro chip inside. The current 24-inch iMac just doesn’t cut it, and the Mac Studio + Apple Display combo is way to expensive compared to the price point of Intel iMacs.

I'd imagine most people going for the Mac Studio arent touching the balked Apple Display. It's been riddled with problems and at that price point you can get far better displays now. The panel they're using dates back to 2017 so it's not exactly like you're getting the latest and greatest in screen technology.

I have one, and from a pure display standpoint, it's the second best display I've ever used right behind the latest MBP 16". I don't use the speakers or webcam, and wish Apple would have left them off and dropped the price. Unfortunately there just isn't any 5k competition out there so Apple can do what they want. If it was cheaper I would have bought two, but as it stands I'm using an old 4k as my secondary monitor.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#146

Post by formerly_proven »

victorelu wrote: post #110
SpacePortKnight wrote: post #74

What I like about Apple is that they have such a clear product lineup that it allows for speculation like this article. On the other hand Microsoft's surface lineup makes no sense and is super confusing. That's true for Samsung as well. Even if these companies had the engineering capacity to make chips like M1; I doubt they would attract even a fraction of the media attention enjoyed by Apple.

Except the iPad lineup which is quite confusing and weirdly speced and priced.

"Big is cheap and small is expensive? What a country!"

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#148

Post by a2tech »

uptown wrote: post #147

I’m fine with the current mini but need to be able to use three 4K displays. That either means using some kind of hack to do that or buying a Studio. Or waiting for maybe a Mini Pro.

I'm in the same boat. I have no problem with the processing speed of the Mini but I want to be able to drive my 6ft of monitors on my desk. Right now I'm using a hackintosh, but I'd switch in a heartbeat if I could

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#149

Post by formerly_proven »

zozbot234 wrote: post #81
alkonaut wrote: post #77

What is the biggest hurdle for the M2 Mac Pro? Is it connectivity that isn't suppported by the chip? E.g. when they want external DRAM and GPU, the M2 SoCs simply don't have that capability so a whole new SoC would be required, with features that would only be used in the Pro, making it a questionable investment? Or is there a more technical hurdle, e.g. that supporting external Dram and third party GPU would require…

Couldn't you connect external DRAM to a Mac Studio via Thunderbolt if you really wanted to? Or is that still missing the same memory coherence semantics as actual DRAM sticks?

Thunderbolt has around two orders of magnitude less bandwidth and two orders of magnitude higher latency than the DRAM in that machine. Viewed through the narrow <40 Gbit/s TB3/4 funnel, you'll have trouble telling DRAM and a PCIe 4 SSD apart.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#150

Post by Damogran6 »

UltraViolence wrote: post #61
klelatti wrote: post #49

Just looking at the economics of the Mac Pro based on sales of the machine itself doesn't quite capture the full picture. An Apple Silicon Mac Pro could have many roles: - A flagship product that demonstrates just how powerful Apple Silicon can be. This in turn could enhance the Apple / Mac brand for a certain group of users. - An aspirational product for users who think that they might need more power in the future.…

This will hold as long as Apple makes tons of money from its iPhone business. The minute however that this starts to sag they'll start cost-cutting and they'll start with unprofitable vanity products like Mac's.

"Apple is Dooomed!" Google: 8,310,000 results in 0.38 seconds

NOBODY has transitioned to an other architecture like Apple has, nor has the industry been kicked in the shorts as many times as by apple. (wholesale inclusion of GPU in the OS, migration from Motorola, to Power PC, to Intel, to Arm to X Efficienty + Y Performance Cores...and nobody wrings as much out of the ARM architecture as Apple.

It's 'the same OS' from the watch, TV, Airpods to the Mac Pro.

There is no cost cutting the top end because it's ALL the same Platform. The Top end is the same as everything else with an additional parlor trick.

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