Apple discontinues the Mac Pro • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#101

Post by kube-system » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 2:35 AM UTC

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?

It's not like Apple soldered some plain old DDR5 to a PCB to be difficult:

1. It's TSMC's InFO_POP, which has significant performance benefits.

2. There weren't even any modules that existed for LPDDR until very recently. (and while the A18 was being designed, it didn't exist)

3. The power/price/performance/thermals they are able to achieve with this configuration is not possible with socketed RAM. You are asking them to make the device worse

Go pop open a Framework with an Ryzen AI Max processor -- you won't find socketed RAM. Technology has moved on. Math coprocessors and CPU cache aren't separate modules anymore either. AMD has even said they studied the possibility of LPCAMM for Strix Halo and found that even it wasn't good enough for signal integrity.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#102

Post by ProllyInfamous » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 2:35 AM UTC

waz0wski wrote: post #27

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?

I just replaced a 2009 MacPro It had many hardware upgrades over the years - upgraded CPUs, 128GB RAM, 4TB NVME storage, a modern AMD GPU, USB3/c, thunderbolt, etc The only reason it got replaced is because it became too much of a PITA to keep modern OSX running on it (via OCLP) Replaced with an M4 Max Mac Studio, which is a nice and faster machine but with no ability to upgrade anything and much worse hardware resal…

I'm a former 4,1 user, myself — replaced with an M2Pro mini Jan 2023 (finally retired fully 2025).

Absolutely recommend you purchase the 4-bay Terramaster external enclosure — gives you four SATA slots that are hot-swappable (unlike MacPro's). 10gbps via USB-C.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#103

Post by hu3 » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 2:35 AM UTC

angoragoats wrote: post #83

testing22321 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 additi…

Can confirm. I have a Ryzen 9800X3D with RTX 5070, 128GB of RAM and TBs of Gen 5.0 NVMes.

Not only it is screamingly fast (the fastest on earth for some workloads), but I can upgrade it easily. And is dead silent too.

The best thing is it runs native Linux and it just works.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#104

Post by oefrha » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 2:36 AM UTC

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…

Does M5 series have better video encoding chip/chiplet/whatever it is called than M4 series? Because while I’m happy with my M4 Pro overall, H.264 encoding performance with videotoolbox_h264 is disappointingly basically exactly the same as a previous 2018 model Intel Mac mini, and blown out of water by nvenc on any mid to high end Nvidia GPU released in the last half-decade, maybe even full decade. And video encoding is a pretty important part of video editing workflow.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#105

Post by angoragoats » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 2:38 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #91

washadjeffmad wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure, but it’s probably reflective of the fact that GPUs generally aren’t PCIe-bandwidth bound. Also, TB5 and Oculink2 both use PCI 4.0 x4 links.

Oculink is generally faster than TB5 despite them both using PCIe 4.0, because Oculink provides direct PCIe access whereas Thunderbolt has to route all PCIe traffic through its controller. The benchmarks show that the overhead introduced by the TB5 controller slows down GPU performance.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#106

Post by readitalready » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 2:39 AM UTC

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #61

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…

I think for AMD, they were focused on competing against Intel. Remember AMD was almost bankrupt about 15 years ago because of competing against Intel. But the very first GPU use for AI was actually with an ATI/AMD GPU, not an Nvidia one. Everyone thinks Nvidia kicked off the GPU AI craze when Ilya Sutskever cleaned up on AlexNet with an Nvidia GPU back in 2012, or when Andrew Ng and team at Stanford published their "Large Scale Deep Unsupervised Learning using Graphics Processors" in 2009, but in 2004, a couple of Korean researchers were the first to implement neural networks on a GPU, using ATI Radeons: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00313...

And as of now I do believe AMD is in the second strongest position in the datacenter space after Nvidia, ahead of even Google.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#107

Post by WillAdams » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 2:40 AM UTC

Amorymeltzer wrote: post #11

nosrepa wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I still don't get it.

Siracusa—probably best known here for doing fabulous OS X reviews for Ars—is a co-host of ATP. He is also known is such circles for having Mac Pros, and using them for a long time (sometimes by choice, sometimes by circumstance). He thinks Apple should make a Mac Pro, not necessarily because it's a big seller, but because he thinks Apple should make a "best computer," much in the same way car companies might make a c…

Ages ago, when new Mac hardware came out, I'd amuse myself by putting together an "ultimate Mac workstation" in the configurator --- once upon a time, one could hit 6 figures pretty easily --- these days, well I panic bought a duplicate computer because I was worried a chipped/cracked display was going to make it unusable (turns out a screen protector has worked thus far).

I agree with the reasoning, and would like to see Apple continue to make aspirational hardware, but maybe the mainstream stuff is good enough?

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#108

Post by nine_k » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 2:41 AM UTC

Forgeties79 wrote: post #72

vlovich123 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I work in media production and I have the same thought constantly. Hell I curse in church as far as my industry is concerned because I find 2.5 to be fine for most of us. 10 absolutely.

I suppose the throughput is not the key, latency is. When you split ann operation that normally ran within one machine between two machines, anything that crosses the boundary becomes orders of magnitude slower. Even with careful structuring, there are limits of how little and how rarely you can send data between nodes.

I suppose that splitting an LLM workload is pretty sensitive to that.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#109

Post by angoragoats » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 2:42 AM UTC

hu3 wrote: post #103

angoragoats wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 additi…

Can confirm. I have a Ryzen 9800X3D with RTX 5070, 128GB of RAM and TBs of Gen 5.0 NVMes. Not only it is screamingly fast (the fastest on earth for some workloads), but I can upgrade it easily. And is dead silent too. The best thing is it runs native Linux and it just works.

And a 9800X3D is not even the fastest CPU out there, nor even the fastest CPU you could use with your specific motherboard. A 9950X3D is essentially two of the 9800X3Ds combined, and would be a drop-in replacement.

Re: Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

#110

Post by zamadatix » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 2:43 AM UTC

oefrha wrote: post #104

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…

Does M5 series have better video encoding chip/chiplet/whatever it is called than M4 series? Because while I’m happy with my M4 Pro overall, H.264 encoding performance with videotoolbox_h264 is disappointingly basically exactly the same as a previous 2018 model Intel Mac mini, and blown out of water by nvenc on any mid to high end Nvidia GPU released in the last half-decade, maybe even full decade. And video encoding…

If you mean editing ProRes is a better fit, if you mean final export software always beats hardware encoders in terms of quality, if you mean mass h.264 transcoding a Mac workstation is probably not the right place though.