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Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

9to5mac.com

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Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#61

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

readitalready wrote: post #59

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.

Just about everybody who isn't Nvidia dropped the ball, bigtime.

Intel should have shipped their GPUs with much more VRAM from day one. If they had done this, they'd have carved out a massive niche and much more market share, and it would have been trivially simple to do.

AMD should have improved their tools and software, etc.

Apple should have done as you say.

Google had nigh on a decade to boost TPU production, and they're still somehow behind the curve.

Such a lack of vision. And thus Nvidia is, now quite durably, the most valuable company in the world. Imagine telling that to a time traveler from 2018.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#62

Post by dd8601fn »

jmgao wrote: post #53
spot wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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

$1,000 just for the case... ouch! (neat though)

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#63

Post by angoragoats »

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

This is a wild and very wrong take.

Just about every single consumer computer shipped today uses PCIe. If you were referring to only only the physical PCIe slots, that's wrong too: the vast majority of desktop computers, servers, and workstations shipped in 2025 had physical PCIe slots (the only ones that didn't were Macs and certain mini-PCs).

The 2023 Mac Pro was dead on arrival because Apple doesn't let you use PCIe GPUs in their systems.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#64

Post by macintux »

w-m wrote: post #6

While the trash can generation was somewhat present and around, I don't think I ever saw a cheese grater in the flesh. Did it have any users? Were there any actual useful expansion cards? Did anybody continue buying this at all, after it didn't get the M3 Ultra bump, that the Mac Studio got last year?

My first non-Linux PC was a cheese grater, way overkill for my needs but served me well for many years.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#65

Post by washadjeffmad »

rayiner wrote: post #51
magic_hamster wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Gaming isn't what people are using Mac Studios for. Thunderbolt also isn't a substitute for OCuLink.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#66

Post by etchalon »

readitalready wrote: post #59

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.

Nothing is a bigger market than the iPhone, let alone expensive niche machines.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#67

Post by GeekyBear »

angoragoats wrote: post #63
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 This is a wild and very wrong take. Just about every single consumer computer shipped today uses PCIe. If you were referring to only only the physical PCIe slots, that's wrong too: the vast majority of desktop computers, servers, and workstations shipped in 2025 had physical PCIe slots (the only ones that didn't were Macs and certain mini-PCs). The 2023 Mac Pro was dead on arrival because…

Thunderbolt is PCIe running over a cable.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#68

Post by vlovich123 »

jltsiren wrote: post #60
aprilnya wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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.

When people talk about 100gigabit networks for Macs, im really curious what kind of network you run at home and how much money you spent on it. Even at work I’m generally seeing 10gigabit network ports with 100gigabit+ only in data centers where macs don’t have a presence

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#69

Post by macintux »

longislandguido wrote: post #34
chasingtheflow wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except by most all regards that product is great.

By "great" do you mean 8GB of non-upgradable soldered RAM in 2026?

You realize that most customer shopping for the cheapest computer they can find are not going to upgrade their RAM.

And Apple is effectively committing to supporting 8GB computers with their OS upgrades for years to come.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#70

Post by zer00eyz »

readitalready wrote: post #59

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.

> something competitive with Nvidia for AI training

Apple is counting on something else: model shrink. Every one is now looking at "how do we make these smaller".

At some point a beefy Mac Studio and the "right sized" model is going to be what people want. Apple dumped a 4 pack of them in the hands of a lot of tech influencers a few months back and they were fairly interesting (expensive tho).

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