Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

9to5mac.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 672 posts

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#51

Post by rayiner »

magic_hamster wrote: post #32
IFC_LLC wrote: post #26

I think that's an expected thing. G5 was the thing. And companies were buying G5 and other macs like that all the time, because you were able to actually extend it with video cards and some special equipment. But now we have M chips. You don't need video for M chips. You kinda do, but truthfully, it's cheaper to buy a beefier Mac than to install a video card. Pro was a great thing for designers and video editors, tho…

> gone are the days of PCIe. My GPU, NVMe drives and motherboard might disagree.

The top Mac Studio has six thunderbolt 5 ports, each of which is a PCIe 4.0 x4 link. Each is a 8GB/sec link in each direction, which is a lot. Going from x16 down to x4 has less than a 10% hit on games: https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/sbegpb/gpu_in_pci...

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#52

Post by SpecialistK »

lapcat wrote: post #35

The 2013 trash can was the end of the Mac Pro. It was never the same after that. The 2012 and earlier Mac Pros were awesome. I had a 2010 model. Here's what I loved: • Multiple hard drive bays for easy swapping of disks, with a side panel that the user could open and close • Expandable RAM • Lots of ports, including audio • The tower took up no desktop space • It was relatively affordable, starting at $2500. Many sof…

When it was introduced, Apple said the trash can was a revolution in cooling design.

Then they said they couldn't upgrade the components because of heat. Everyone knows that wasn't true.

By the time Apple said they had issues with it in 2017, AMD were offering 14nm GCN4 and 5 graphics (Polaris and Vega) compared to the 28nm GCN1 graphics in the FirePro range. Intel had moved from Ivy Bridge to Skylake for Xeons. And if they wanted to be really bold (doubtful, as the move to ARM was coming) then the 1st gen Epyc was on the market too.

Moore's Law didn't stop applying for 6 years. They had options and chose to abandon their flagship product (and most loyal customers) instead.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#53

Post by jmgao »

spot wrote: post #24
internet2000 wrote: post #22

I hope I can get a cheap one on Craigslist eventually, just for the novelty. It looks so cool.

[flagged]

MCPRUE sells shameless ripoffs of the Mac Pro case, but with support for standard motherboard sizing, if you really want your PC to double as a cheese grater: https://www.mcprue.com/case

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#54

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

aprilnya wrote: post #47
magic_hamster wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gone are the days of PCIe. My GPU, NVMe drives and motherboard might disagree.

- GPU is integrated into the SoC - Surprisingly, it is possible to plug a drive into a TB/USB port …so what do you actually need PCIe for?

but what about second GPU?

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#55

Post by tylerflick »

IFC_LLC wrote: post #26

I think that's an expected thing. G5 was the thing. And companies were buying G5 and other macs like that all the time, because you were able to actually extend it with video cards and some special equipment. But now we have M chips. You don't need video for M chips. You kinda do, but truthfully, it's cheaper to buy a beefier Mac than to install a video card. Pro was a great thing for designers and video editors, tho…

> gone are the days of PCIe

Thunderbolt is external PCIe.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#56

Post by system2 »

If I remember correctly, the maximum configuration was something like $35k back in the day. I wonder what those people feel like now. On the other hand, if they have $35k to burn, probably they don't even think about it.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#57

Post by ks2048 »

With the popularity of mac mini (and macbooks for that matter) for doing ML/AI work, I would have thought Apple could make a Mac Pro that could make for a good workstation for doing in-house ML/AI stuff.

I bought a GPU maybe a decade ago for this, and it's not worth the hassle (for me at least), but a nice out-of-the box solution, I would pay for.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#59

Post by readitalready »

Apple really dropped the ball here. They had every ability to make something competitive with Nvidia for AI training as well as inference, by selling high end multi GPU Mac Pro workstations as well as servers, but for some reason chose not to. They had the infrastructure and custom SoCs and everything. What a waste.

It really could have been a bigger market for them than even the iPhone.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#60

Post by jltsiren »

aprilnya wrote: post #47
magic_hamster wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gone are the days of PCIe. My GPU, NVMe drives and motherboard might disagree.

- GPU is integrated into the SoC - Surprisingly, it is possible to plug a drive into a TB/USB port …so what do you actually need PCIe for?

High-end Macs have moved to PCIe 5.0 speeds in their internal drives. Thunderbolt 5 is not fast enough to get the same performance from external ones.

Thunderbolt is also too slow for higher-end networks. A single port is already insufficient for 100-gigabit speeds.

Post reply on HN