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Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

9to5mac.com

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Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#81

Post by hazz99 »

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…

Plus modern interconnects like CXL are also layers on top of PCIe, and USB4 supports PCIe tunnelling. PCIe is a big collection of specifications, the physical/link/transaction layers can be mixed and matched and evolved separately.

I don't see it disappearing, at most we'll get PCIe 6/7/etc.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#82

Post by longislandguido »

brailsafe wrote: post #17

Pour one out for John Siracusa

Here's an interesting fact, one of the more famous and fanatical fanboy Mac Pro users was late radio host Rush Limbaugh (he owned four of them), who dedicated an entire segment to the topic on his normally all-politics show when Apple dropped the ball on Thunderbolt back in the day.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#83

Post by angoragoats »

testing22321 wrote: post #41
spot wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Burn more power for a slower computer! That’ll shoe em.

A Ryzen 9800X3D is about 40% faster in single-core tests and the same speed to slightly faster at multi-core tasks, as compared to the M2 Ultra in the Mac Pro. In addition, the Ryzen computer would presumably be modular and allow for the user to choose their preferred configuration of memory, storage, GPU, etc, with options far exceeding those offered by Apple in its limited and non-user-upgradable machine. In addition, configuring the Ryzen machine with comparable specs to the base model Mac Pro (64GB of ram, 1TB of storage, and a low-end to midrange discrete GPU) would put you at a total system cost of something like 20-25% of the $6999 that the Mac Pro cost, even with today's inflated memory prices.

I'm not sure if this is what the parent meant by "a real modern PC," but it would certainly be 1) faster and 2) vastly cheaper than the Mac. So at minimum, your assertion that it'd be slower is wrong.

Depending on your configuration, you could likely also match the overall power consumption of the Mac as well, though yes, it is easily possible to exceed it. But the most likely way you'd exceed it is with a high-end GPU, which would vastly outperform the (fixed, non-upgradeable) GPU in the Mac.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#84

Post by dijit »

bigyabai wrote: post #23
internet2000 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple's refusal to adopt basic M.2 spec I get the ideological angle, but in practical terms that's not a barrier: https://www.aliexpress.us/w/wholesale-apple-ssd-adapter.html...

This is the USB-C dongle argument all over again, but with a proprietary connector that a total of one (1) company uses.

Honestly I don't care, but Apples SSDs don't have a storage controller on them, and those adapters are designed to "bypass" the controller on m.2 drives.

You can argue that it's different for the sake of being different, but

A) I personally don't always hold that monopoly is a good thing, even if we agree m.2 is fairly decent it doesn't make it universally the best.

B) I'd make the argument that Apple is competing very well with performance and reliability..

C) IIRC there are some hardware guarantees that the new filesystem needs to be aware of (for wear levelling and error-correction) and those would be obfuscated by a controller that thinks its smarter than the CPU and OS.

if we're talking about Intel era Macs then that proprietary connector predates M.2 entirely and is actually even thinner and smaller (which is pretty important when the primary use-cases is thin-and-lights); though I suppose that the adapter fits is a sign that it would have been possible to use a larger connector...

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#85

Post by angoragoats »

GeekyBear wrote: post #67
angoragoats wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, I know; this is part of what I was implying when I said "Just about every single consumer computer shipped today uses PCIe."

I don't understand how this is a response to anything I said.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#86

Post by SpecialistK »

dijit wrote: post #74
SpecialistK wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The biggest issue was actually that the Mac Pro was designed specifically for dual GPUs- in the era of SLI this made some sense, but once that technology was abandoned it was a technological dead-end. If you take one apart you'll see why, it's not the case that you could have ever swapped around the components to make it dual-CPU instead; it really was "dual GPU or bust". Somewhat ironically, in todays ML ecosystem,…

I'll admit that while I've used the trash can but never taken it apart myself. But I can't imagine it would have been impossible to throw 2x Polaris 10 GPUs on the daughterboards in place of the FirePros.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#87

Post by ImJasonH »

longislandguido wrote: post #82
brailsafe wrote: post #17

Pour one out for John Siracusa

Here's an interesting fact, one of the more famous and fanatical fanboy Mac Pro users was late radio host Rush Limbaugh (he owned four of them), who dedicated an entire segment to the topic on his normally all-politics show when Apple dropped the ball on Thunderbolt back in the day.

That is an interesting fact indeed!

https://macdailynews.com/2012/06/12/rush-limbaugh-okay-apple...

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#88

Post by SpecialistK »

jasomill wrote: post #80
SpecialistK wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Aside from the GPU mess, the 2013 was a nice machine, basically a proto-Mac Studio. Aside from software, the only thing that pushed me off my D300/64GB/12-core as an everyday desktop + front-end machine is the fact that there's no economically sensible way to get 4K video at 120 Hz given that an eGPU enclosure + a decent AMD GPU would cost as much as a Mac mini, so I'm slumming it in Windows for a few months until th…

I'm in the Linux desktop / Mac laptop camp, and it works well for me. Prevents me getting too tied up in any one ecosystem so that I can jump ship if Apple start releasing duds again.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#89

Post by whalesalad »

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…

it's not just about pcie, it's socketed memory and disks. I guess disks are just pcie technically - but memory sockets are great. hell, in the pro chassis I am surprised they didn't opt for a socketed cpu that could be upgraded.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#90

Post by dijit »

SpecialistK wrote: post #86
dijit wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest issue was actually that the Mac Pro was designed specifically for dual GPUs- in the era of SLI this made some sense, but once that technology was abandoned it was a technological dead-end. If you take one apart you'll see why, it's not the case that you could have ever swapped around the components to make it dual-CPU instead; it really was "dual GPU or bust". Somewhat ironically, in todays ML ecosystem,…

I'll admit that while I've used the trash can but never taken it apart myself. But I can't imagine it would have been impossible to throw 2x Polaris 10 GPUs on the daughterboards in place of the FirePros.

I think on a technical level you're right, but you need to run two of them and they'd need a custom design like so:

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/RQIAAOSwxKFoTHe3/s-l1200.jpg

For what is essentially a dead-end technology, I'm somewhat doubtful people would have bought it (since the second GPU is going to be idle and add to the cost massively).

the CPU being upgraded would have been much easier though I think.

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